The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Trauma · Nervous System · Mind-Body Connection · Healing

By: Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

The Body Keeps the Score explores how difficult and overwhelming experiences can stay with us long after they are over, not only in our memories, but also in our bodies, emotions, relationships, and nervous system. What I appreciate about this book is the way it helps us understand that many of our reactions have a history. Anxiety, shutting down, feeling constantly alert, difficulty trusting, or feeling disconnected from ourselves can sometimes be connected to what we have lived through and how our bodies learned to protect us.

I often recommend The Body Keeps the Score because it can help us approach ourselves with more curiosity and compassion. It reminds us that healing is not only about understanding what happened, but also about rebuilding safety, connection, and trust within ourselves.

From GoodRead:

A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world's foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors.

In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers' capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga, that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain's natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk's own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal, and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.

Untamed

Self-Discovery · Vulnerability · Intuition · Identity

by: Glennon Doyle

Untamed is a warm, powerful exploration of what it means to come home to yourself. It invites us to look at the ways we may have learned to quiet parts of ourselves in order to belong, be accepted, or meet the expectations of others. At the heart of the book is the idea of reconnecting with our inner “knowing” that deeper part of ourselves that often understands what feels true before we can fully explain it. It explores vulnerability and sensitivity not as weaknesses, but as meaningful parts of being human.

I often recommend Untamed to anyone who is trying to understand themselves more deeply, trust their own voice, and reconnect with who they are beneath the roles, expectations, and noise of everyday life.

From GoodRead:

Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

Therapy · Vulnerability · Relationships · Emotional Growth

By: Lori Gottlieb

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone offers a warm and very human look at therapy from both sides of the room. It explores what happens when a therapist becomes the client herself, while also reflecting on the lives, struggles, defenses, grief, relationships, and growth of the people she works with. What I appreciate about this book is how it reminds us that therapists are human too, and that healing rarely happens in a straight line. We can understand ourselves intellectually and still struggle emotionally. We can know what needs to change and still feel afraid to change it.

I often recommend this book because it makes therapy feel real, relatable, and deeply human. It encourages us to look at our own patterns with more curiosity, vulnerability, and compassion, and to recognize that asking for help can be part of understanding ourselves more fully.

Frome GoodRead:

One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.

As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.

With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.

The Alchemist

Self-Discovery · Intuition · Purpose · Personal Growth

By: Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist is a simple but deeply meaningful story about listening to yourself, trusting your path, and having the courage to move toward the life that feels true to you. What makes this book special is the way it explores intuition, fear, uncertainty, purpose, and the signs we sometimes notice when we are paying closer attention to ourselves and the world around us. It reminds us that growth often requires leaving what feels familiar and becoming willing to discover who we are along the way.

I often recommend The Alchemist because it encourages reflection on our own dreams, the fears that hold us back, and that quiet inner knowing that can guide us when we learn to trust it.

From GoodRead:

Combining magic, mysticism, wisdom, and wonder into an inspiring tale of self-discovery, The Alchemist has become a modern classic, selling millions of copies around the world and transforming the lives of countless readers across generations.

Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different, and far more satisfying—than he ever imagined. Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, following our dreams.

Women Who Run with the Wolves

Intuition · Women & Identity · Self-Discovery · Creativity

By: Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Women Who Run With the Wolves is a deeply reflective exploration of instinct, intuition, creativity, and the parts of ourselves that can become buried beneath expectations, responsibilities, and the need to fit into the world around us. Through stories, myths, and old folktales, the book invites us to reconnect with what it calls the “wild woman” not wild in the sense of being reckless, but the instinctive, knowing, creative part of ourselves that recognizes what feels alive, what feels wrong, what we need, and when something in our lives needs to change.

I often recommend this book because it encourages us to become curious about the parts of ourselves we may have silenced or forgotten. It is especially meaningful for exploring intuition, sensitivity, boundaries, relationships, loss, creativity, and the process of finding our way back to ourselves.

From GoodRead

Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species. For though the gifts of wildish nature belong to us at birth, society’s attempt to “civilize” us into rigid roles has muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls.

In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, many from her own traditions, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine.

Dr. Estés has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.