Body Disorders

When it comes to health, there is one criminally overlooked element: sleep. Good sleep helps you shed fat for good, stave off disease, stay productive, and improve virtually every function of your mind and body. That's what Shawn Stevenson learned when a degenerative bone disease crushed his dream of becoming a professional athlete. Like many of us, he gave up on his health and his body...until he decided there must be a better way.

In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.

Sara suffered a debilitating fear of asserting herself. Spencer experienced crippling social anxiety. Bonnie was shut down, disconnected from her feelings. These patients all came to psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel seeking treatment for depression, but in fact none of them were chemically depressed. Rather, Jacobs Hendel found that they’d all experienced traumas in their youth that caused them to put up emotional defenses that masqueraded as symptoms of depression. Jacobs Hendel led these patients and others toward lives newly capable of joy and fulfillment....

In Trauma and Memory, best-selling author Dr. Peter Levine (creator of the Somatic Experiencing approach) tackles one of the most difficult and controversial questions of PTSD/trauma therapy: Can we trust our memories? While some argue that traumatic memories are unreliable and not useful, others insist that we absolutely must rely on memory to make sense of past experience. Dr. Levine suggests that there are elements of truth in both camps.

From pioneering therapist Cathy A. Malchiodi, this book synthesizes the breadth of research on trauma and the brain and presents an innovative framework for treating trauma through the expressive arts.

Lia and Cassie are best friends, wintergirls frozen in fragile bodies, competitors in a deadly contest to see who can be the thinnest. But then Cassie suffers the ultimate loss - her life - and Lia is left behind, haunted by her friend's memory and racked with guilt for not being able to help save her.

Seventeen-year-old Elena is vanishing. Every day means renewed determination, so every day means fewer calories. This is the story of a girl whose armor against anxiety becomes artillery against herself as she battles on both sides of a lose-lose war in a struggle with anorexia.

Anxiety affects more than forty million Americans—a number that continues to climb in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. While conventional medicine tends to view anxiety as a “neck-up” problem—that is, one of brain chemistry and psychology—the truth is that the origins of anxiety are rooted in the body. In The Anatomy of Anxiety, holistic psychiatrist Dr. Ellen Vora offers nothing less than a paradigm shift in our understanding of anxiety and mental health, suggesting that anxiety is not simply a brain disorder but a whole-body condition.

A body-focused, trauma-informed art therapy that will appeal to art therapists, somatic experiencing practitioners, bodyworkers, artists, and mental health professionals

The aftermath of a single event or repeated trauma can profoundly shape how we experience the rest of our lives. Whether it occurred in childhood, a recent relationship, a catastrophe, or other situation, trauma can have lifelong effects. Yet, as impossible as it may seem now, says Dr. Arielle Schwartz, you can return to wholeness. This pioneering psychotherapist, a survivor of complex trauma herself, has helped thousands. With Trauma Recovery, she brings us a compassionate and practice-oriented audio resource for transformation and growth.

Brittany Piper spent most of her life sitting across from conventional therapists recalling the painful stories of her trauma. But rehashing each harrowing event—being put into foster care as a baby, losing her brother in a car accident, enduring a brutal rape and a very public trial, and more—made her even more stuck. At a crossroads, she took her recovery into her own hands. On this journey, Brittany discovered emerging science that explains how and why trauma lives in our bodies, not in the story of what happened to us.

If you've experienced physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, your past trauma could affect how you care for yourself today. You may struggle with difficult thoughts and feelings, and reach for food to soothe your emotions when feeling sad, anxious, or stressed. You aren't alone. Healing Emotional Eating for Trauma Survivors offers an innovative, trauma-informed approach to overcoming emotional eating using the principles of mindfulness, self-compassion, and neuroscience.

Stress is our internal response to an experience that our brain perceives as threatening or challenging. Trauma is our response to an experience in which we feel powerless or lacking agency. Until now, researchers have treated these conditions as different, but they actually lie along a continuum. Dr. Elizabeth Stanley explains the significance of this continuum, how it affects our resilience in the face of challenge, and why an event that's stressful for one person can be traumatizing for another.

In The Wisdom of Your Body, clinical psychologist and award-winning researcher Hillary McBride explored the ways many of us inherit a broken understanding of the body and offered a more compassionate, healthy, and holistic perspective on embodied life. In this follow-up book, McBride takes the principles of The Wisdom of Your Body and puts them into action in practical, tangible ways.

Traumatic life experiences can be devastating, and they inevitably shape who you are. Such events can also become a powerful force that awakens you to an undercurrent of your own aliveness. Trauma recovery involves learning to trust in your capacity for new growth. In order to grow, we must make use of our suffering in order to find our happiness. Within this audiobook, you will find an invitation to see yourself as the hero or heroine of your own life journey. A hero's journey involves walking into the darkness on a quest for wholeness

Overcoming Trauma Through Yoga is a book for survivors, clinicians, and yoga instructors who are interested in mind/body healing. It introduces trauma-sensitive yoga, a modified approach to yoga developed in collaboration between yoga teachers and clinicians at the Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute, led by yoga teacher David Emerson, along with medical doctor Bessel van der Kolk.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Arielle Schwartz has spent years helping those with complex PTSD—also referred to as C-PTSD—find their way to wholeness. She also knows the territory of the healing firsthand, having walked it herself. This audiobook provides a map to the complicated, and often overwhelming, terrain of C-PTSD with Dr. Schwartz’s knowledgeable guidance helping you find your way.

Recent years have seen a shocking increase in antidepressant use the world over, with one in four women starting her day with medication. These drugs have steadily become the panacea for everything from grief, irritability, and panic attacks to insomnia, PMS, and stress. But the truth is, what women really need can't be found at a pharmacy.

For years, we've understood the connection between trauma and mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety. But somatic psychology has recently shown that our bodies hold on to trauma, and trauma can manifest in physical symptoms. In addition, we now know that developmental trauma can result in profound emotional stress and lead to serious diseases. Building on this knowledge, this cutting-edge guide offers simple skills for connecting and calming your body, balancing your emotions, and rewiring old patterns of reactivity for better self-regulation.

She was a good girl from a good family, with everything she could want or need. But below the surface, she felt like she could never be good enough. Like she could never live up to the expectations that surrounded her. Like she couldn't do anything to make a change. But there was one thing she could control completely: how much she ate. The less she ate, the better - stronger - she felt. But it's a dangerous game, and there is such a thing as going too far.... Her innermost thoughts and feelings are chronicled in the diary she left behind.