Trauma Memoir

The founder of Recovery Management Agency—the world’s first agency devoted to helping addicts heal their addictions by reawakening their souls—uses her knowledge of depth psychology and her personal experience as a recovering addict to help you reconnect with soul, find meaning and live your purpose.

In 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design a weekend home for her outside of Chicago. Edith was a woman ahead of her time—unmarried, she was a distinguished medical researcher, as well as an accomplished violinist, translator, and poet. The two quickly began spending weekends together, talking philosophy, Catholic mysticism, and, of course, architecture over wine-soaked picnic lunches.

A week after my 50th birthday, and just as our family was about to move home, something happened that changed the way I looked at life. I spoke to others about how they rebuilt their shattered worlds after very different personal traumas, emerging stronger than before. I hope our experiences, together with the latest science on resilience, will help guide all those going through tough times. This book says that it's possible not just to survive them but to thrive. To rise.

Growing up, Lisa Nikolidakis tried to make sense of her childhood, which was scarred by abuse, violence, and psychological terrors so extreme that her relationship with her father was cleaved beyond repair. Having finally been able to leave that relationship behind, surviving meant forgetting. For years, “I’m fine” was a lie Nikolidakis repeated. Then, on her twenty-seventh birthday, Nikolidakis’s father murdered his girlfriend and her daughter, and turned the gun on himself.

Wise and embodied, fearless and necessary, Being (Sick) Enough is both a wild awakening and a love letter to your whole self: the pains and suffering, joys and brightness, and vital connections that hold each of us as we navigate what it means to be here, like this, right now.

A gripping true story exploring violence, mental health, and trauma, A Life for a Life follows Kevin Shird and Damion Neal, who meet as inmates in Federal Correctional Institute Allenwood. Kevin is serving time for drug trafficking, and he suffers from severe nightmares and sleep deprivation due to past traumas and copes through rigorous exercise instead of medication. He tries to guide Damion, a temperamental young man, hoping to keep him out of trouble in a dangerous environment and reunite him with his young daughter.

Having struggled with gut-wrenching depression, a broken back, sexual abuse, a severe eating disorder, attempted suicide, and a brain aneurysm - all before she was 18 - Dawn learned to become a fighter and survivor. Her deepest desire is to turn everyone she meets into their own rock star through her strategy based coaching practice.

A practical and inspiring guide to transformational personal storytelling, The Story You Need to Tell is the product of Sandra Marinella’s pioneering work with veterans and cancer patients, her years of teaching writing, and her research into its profound healing properties. Riveting true stories illustrate Marinella’s methods for understanding, telling, and editing personal stories in ways that foster resilience and renewal. She also shares her own experience of using journaling and expressive writing to navigate challenges including breast cancer and postpartum depression.

Trauma surgeon Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all—gunshot wounds, stabbings, traumatic brain injuries—and ushers us into the trauma bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass. As a Harvard-trained physician, he learned to keep his head down and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow rage when patients told him to take out the trash. Just days after the tragic police shootings of two Black men, he tried to save the lives of officers shot in the deadliest incident for US law enforcement since 9/11.

By his 40s, Peter J. Boni was an accomplished CEO, with a specialty in navigating high-tech companies out of hot water. Just before his 50th birthday, Peter’s 75-year-old mother unveiled a bombshell: His deceased father was not his biological father. Peter was conceived in 1945 via an anonymous sperm donor. The emotional upheaval upon learning that he was “misattributed” rekindled traumas long past and fueled his relentless research to find his genealogy.

This is a collection of poems inspired by love, loss of love, and other tragic and traumatic events that began in late July of 2000—so some poems are about love and others about the loss of that love. This is my autobiography in poetry form.

A “daring, urgent, and transformative” (Brené Brown, New York Times best-selling author of Dare to Lead) exploration of Black achievement in a white world based on honest, provocative, and moving interviews with Black leaders, scientists, artists, activists, and champions.

“You were like this once. What did you do to get better?” A day out from a mental institution, a woman devastated by flashbacks from childhood trauma poses this question to her big brother. Within a few weeks, she took her own life. This book is the answer that her brother wished he could have offered. Spiritual director and professor Frank Rogers had been there. As a young adult, he too was tormented by trauma suffered in the same family.

October 2021. Whitney Lyn Allen’s happiness came screeching to a standstill. Stunned by her husband Ryan's rare allergic reaction to a bee sting, the 35-year-old felt hopeless after Ryan succumbed to irreversible brain damage. With his unexpected death leaving a massive gap in their close-knit family, she feared she would never be enough to raise their two young boys.

When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change. A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be "managed", and Rachel had, at best, two years to live. Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive.

With an audacious persistence to reclaim her life, Tia set off on a 15-year path to psychological health. The result is an emotionally regulated, actualized, self-aware woman able to tell her hard story without retraumatizing herself, a woman able to reach a hand back to help others claim what’s theirs. If trauma took your past, it shouldn’t get your present and future too. Through a series of personal stories, therapeutic stages, and resources built around a multi-step model, Tia Levings will guide you through the journey that helped her leave abuse, rediscover selfhood, and heal her mind.

Emotionally battered and neglected by her personality disordered parents—and manipulated by Mormon beliefs—16-year-old Sarah was convinced her boyfriend Michael would save her. When her parents discovered that they’d committed the sin of premarital sex, the aftermath left the teenagers irrevocably bonded.

Adoption is often framed by happy narratives, but the reality is that many adoptees struggle with unaddressed trauma and issues of identity and belonging. Adoptees often spend the majority of their youth without the language to explore the grief related to adoption or the permission to legitimize their conflicting emotions. Adoptee and counselor Cameron Lee Small names the realities of the adoptee's journey, narrating his own and other adoptees' stories in all their complexity.

Introducing Releasing Me: A Memoir" by Kimberly Y. Frederick-Griffin. In this powerful narrative, Kimberly shares the deeply personal story of her tumultuous childhood, marked by trauma and emotional turmoil that shaped her relationships and hindered her pursuit of happiness. Through candid reflections, she unveils the struggles she faced, from battling destructive patterns to grappling with feelings of isolation and unacceptance.

The trauma of surviving an abusive marriage didn’t make Kelly Sundberg stronger. In fact, it nearly broke her. But leaving the abuse behind was not the end of the story but the beginning of a new one. In that journey, Sundberg learned in ways both good and bad, that one doesn’t necessarily get to leave abuse behind. Sometimes, everywhere you go, the memories of the abuse go with you.