Powerful Books On Emotional Abuse to Read

Van Der Kolk has created a coherent blueprint for understanding and treating trauma in this book. He explores how trauma impacts the more ancient (reptilian) part of the brain, and how it can ‘communicate’ with this pre-verbal system through the body. This depends on willingness and capacity to feel and experience what is going on inside us, not just think about it. This book describes the combination of a bottom-up (somatic) and a top-down (cognitive) approach.

This book is helpful in validating experiences of emotional abuse in context of the ways in which individuals who inflict psychological abuse may deceive their victims. This can arise through lies, games, and tactics to gain control. This book is often helpful to patients because it leads to feelings of being seen, heard, and believed, which for many is often lacking and helps with the healing process. Its helps readers come to terms with the fact that the abuse they’ve experienced is not their fault or that they are crazy or imagining it. Another benefit if the book is that it spells out the recovery process in 6 tangible steps (e.g., despair, education, awakening, boundaries, restoration and maintenance). This is a clear and concise manual for individual working on healing from emotional abuse.

This is one of my favorite books as a psychologist. Herman writes with love, and encouragement and thoughtfulness. I’ve read it and recommended it many times over. She elegantly traces the history of the idea of trauma to the detection of PTSD in war veterans to the feminist recognition of domestic and sexual violence, and child abuse. She also speaks to the tendency for suffering to not be recognized in certain groups or for individuals with symptoms that are instead patholgized or disregarded. This book is stunningly written, and accessible to readers from all backgrounds.

In this book, I talk in-depth on my experiences of being in an emotionally abusive relationship as well as dealing with abuse throughout my time in the foster care system.

More than ever children must learn how to deal and report emotional abuse and neglect. Our education system fails with teaching our children how to deal with anxiety, depression, and the emotions they feel. This causes issues later in their life when it comes addiction. Now more than ever we must teach if not ourselves, our children about how to deal with emotion.

Healing your inner child naturally helps to heal past traumas, no matter when in your life they occurred. This workbook helps you identify your inner child, heal the wounds our inner children inevitably have, and cultivate the power of a childlike mindset: embracing a life that makes room for play and innocence. All of this work helps us to stop letting the past decide how we want to live our lives right now, which includes healing from emotional abuse.