TL;DR –Fall's arrival brings more than pumpkin spice—it signals a season of intellectual renewal, when trauma survivors can dive into curated reading that makes them feel less alone while providing practical healing tools. This carefully organized book list spans trauma's biological impact (van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score"), healing pathways (Fisher's "Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma"), memoirs of estrangement (Westover's "Educated"), personality-disordered parents (Gibson's "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents"), addiction in families (Beattie's "Codependent No More"), and meaning-making after trauma (Estes' "Women Who Run with the Wolves"). Each book serves as a "pen and paper friend" offering what therapy sessions alone sometimes can't: 24/7 companionship through dark nights, validation that your experiences are real, and evidence that others have walked this path before you.
The list acknowledges that healing from relational trauma requires multiple resources—not just therapy but psychoeducation, survivor stories, and practical workbooks that help you understand how childhood biography becomes adult biology. By organizing books like bookstore aisles, you can browse based on your specific history: whether you need to understand intergenerational trauma transmission, navigate estrangement decisions, or reclaim the unlived life trauma stole from you.
The other day before work I had to run an early morning errand.
I walked out of the house, paused, felt the air, and immediately went back inside to get my sweater coat.
Throwing it on I went back outside, thrilled to feel the coolness in the air and the damp, leafy smell that heralds Fall.
As I drove and completed my errand, I felt a surge of enlivenment from feeling the change of the seasons.
I’ve always loved Fall.
I loved (and still love) school and anything related to learning.
And don’t even get me started on my obsession with great office supplies!
Fall to me is a time of fresh starts and a time of the mind – losing myself in new books, and new subjects, and feeling the pleasant fatigue in my brain after learning hard things.
When the weather changes and Labor Day is in the rearview mirror, some people want pumpkin spice lattes and to break out their Ugg boots.
I want a package of Audible credits and a brand new Moleskine for my journaling…
So in honor of Fall and this season of learning and expanding our intellectual horizons, I wanted to make today’s post less an essay than a list.
A list of curated books that I dearly love.
These books have helped me enormously over the last 20 years on my own relational trauma recovery journey.
I’ve arranged this list by topic area, much like aisles in a bookstore, so that you can browse and see what interests you based on your own personal history.
If you can find even one pen and paper friend from this list, one work that makes you feel less alone and imbues you with a little more hope, more knowledge, and helpful tools, that will make me so happy.
So please, peruse the reading list for trauma recovery. And, if you don’t mind, in the comments of today’s post, please let me know what books you might add to this list that have been so helpful in your own relational trauma recovery journey.
This little website gets about 25,000 visitors per month so your contribution and comment might point someone in the right direction to a resource that helps them enormously.
So thank you in advance for generously sharing.
Happy Fall and please take such good care of yourself.
You’re so worth it.
Warmly, Annie
A Reading List To Support Your Relational Trauma Recovery Journey
Top trauma books to explain the biological impact of childhood trauma:
- The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, And Body In The Healing Of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, MD. This book is a classic for clinicians interested in helping our clients heal from traumatic experiences. Like other books mentioned on the list, this may be denser reading. But it’s excellent if you want a comprehensive view of what trauma can look like.
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START THE QUIZ- It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn. Building upon the work of Bessel van der Kolk and other great trauma clinicians, this popular book explores the intergenerational impact of trauma – specifically the neuropsychological expression of it in our lives – and provides interactive tools to explore your own possible manifestations of inherited trauma.
- Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology And How You Can Heal by Donna Jackson Nakazawa. This book, in relatable and clear ways, explores how the adverse childhood experiences we live through leave “fingerprints” on our biology and what tools and options are available to us to help us overcome our adverse histories.
Top trauma books to outline the healing pathway out of trauma’s grip:
- Transforming The Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists by Janina Fisher, Ph.D. I respect Janina Fisher’s work enormously and this recent publication of hers is one of the top psychoeducational resources that I recommend to clients as a complement to our work together to help illustrate the impact of trauma and bring clarity to confusion around the trauma symptoms they experience.
- Journey Through Trauma: A Trail Guide to the 5-Phase Cycle of Healing Repeated Trauma by Gretchen Schmelzer, Ph.D. Beautifully written by a clinician and trauma survivor herself, this book helps childhood trauma survivors make sense of their experiences in the world and begin to think through their healing journey differently.
- The Complex PTSD Workbook: A Mind-Body Approach to Regaining Emotional Control and Becoming Whole by Arielle Schwartz, Ph.D. An excellent and practical workbook by a body-centered psychotherapist who I know and respect deeply, this book walks trauma survivors through manageable and tolerable exercises to support their healing journey.
Biographies and stories of estrangement, disownment, and abuse:
- Educated by Tara Westover, Ph.D. One of the few books I can honestly say I’ve read four times. (And will likely read once a year – I love it that much!) This blockbuster memoir is extreme and perhaps not relatable in the exact details of the family’s landscape, but does relatably illustrate what it’s like to come from a fractured family, split by members’ mental illness, and to experience the gaslighting, disownment and estrangement that sometimes comes as a cost when you begin to heal. I truly can’t recommend this book enough. (And if anyone on this knows Tara Westover, there’s no one else I’d rather get coffee with so please feel free to make a virtual introduction!)
- Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement by Harriet Brown. Another fantastic, well-written book that speaks to the “unspeakable” – estrangement from one’s own parents. The author weaves her story with others in a compelling, honest, and, to be quite honest, refreshing way.
- Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home by Jessica Berger Gross. This book might be particularly impactful for anyone who grew up in a family that looked “great” on the outside but on the inside experienced emotional and mental abuse. The author chronicles her journey and, so importantly, speaks about how her healing came in tandem with her decision to estrange herself from her family of origin.
Books if you grew up with personality and mood-disordered parents:
- Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson. A powerful read for those who can’t point to anything “dramatic” or “extreme” about their parenting experience, and yet who still feel strong emotional wounds from childhood.
- Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem by Kimberlee Roth. A volume of hope and help for those who were parented by someone with diagnosed or suspected Borderline Personality Disorder.
- Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers by Karyl McBride, Ph.D. An excellent read for daughters (and sons!) of those who had mothers who were largely selfish, self-involved, and whose love felt conditional.
- Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder by Paul T. T. Mason, MS and Randi Kreger. Another classic and staple for those with diagnosed or suspected Borderline parents. Helpful for anyone who had to ensure feelings and conditions of emotional, verbal, and physical instability and lack of safety growing up.
Books that speak to being part of a family system where there is addiction:
- Codependent No More by Melody Beattie. A classic for those of us who come from addictive family systems who struggle with knowing where their business ends and another person’s business begins, a common symptom of being raised within an addictive family system.
- Beyond Addiction by Jeffery Foote, Ph.D. and Carrie Wilkens, Ph.D. A great resource both for anyone with an addiction or for the family member of someone who struggles with addiction. Particularly useful for those who are off put by AA.
- Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions by Russell Brand. A raw, honest, humorous but serious memoir from comedian and actor Russell Brand. This book brings a human lens to addiction. It might be helpful for the loved one of an addict to read. Especially if they want to learn more about what the addict’s experience is like.
- In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté, MD. A more clinical book than others in this section. But nonetheless wise and helpful to the family member of an addict. Dr. Maté’s work reframes addiction and helps humanize the sufferer.
Books to support living a life as meaningful as possible in the brief time we have:
- I Will Not Die An Unlived Life: Reclaiming Purpose and Passion by Dawna Markova, Ph.D. At the end of the day, relational trauma recovery work’s final stage, after stabilization and processing/grieving, is sense-making and meaning-making, moving forward to build as meaningful and fulfilled life as possible. This book explores how one woman discovered her own meaning and purpose after a life-threatening diagnosis.
- A Year To Live: How To Live This Year As If It Were Your Last by Stephen Levine. This precious book gently helps us face death by considering its omnipresence. And, through a series of meditations and prompts, helps us to more fully live before we die.
- Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. This is the book that brought me into the field of psychotherapy. It will forever and always remain on any relational trauma recovery reading list I curate. This classic work uses poem, fable, tale, and psychoeducation to speak to the mind, yes. But it also bypasses the mind and speaks straight to the soul. Kindling a spark and igniting a sense of enlivenment. I truly can’t recommend it enough.
Integrating Bibliotherapy Into Your Trauma Healing Journey
When you bring a passage from “The Body Keeps the Score” into therapy, underlining the section that finally explains why your body freezes during conflict, you’re engaging in bibliotherapy—using carefully chosen books to deepen therapeutic work between sessions.
Your trauma-informed therapist understands that reading serves multiple healing functions: providing psychoeducation that normalizes symptoms, offering 3am companionship when intrusive memories strike, and creating cognitive frameworks that help you understand why an inspiring, nourishing, healing, therapist-approved list of books can be as essential as therapy itself. Together, you might explore which books resonate versus which trigger, using your reactions as diagnostic information about what needs processing.
The therapeutic process involves helping you discern between helpful and harmful reading—distinguishing books that validate and educate from those that retraumatize or encourage premature forgiveness.
Your therapist might assign specific chapters as homework, using workbooks like Fisher’s “Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma” to reinforce session concepts, or suggest memoirs when you need to feel less alone in your estrangement decision. They help you process the grief that surfaces when reading about secure childhoods you didn’t have, the anger when recognizing your parents in descriptions of personality disorders, the relief when clinical explanations finally make sense of lifelong confusion.
Most importantly, bibliotherapy in trauma recovery isn’t just intellectual exercise but somatic integration—your therapist helps you notice how your body responds to different texts, when to pause and ground yourself, how to metabolize difficult truths at a pace your nervous system can handle. Through combining the holding environment of therapy with the 24/7 availability of books, you build a comprehensive support system where healing happens both in session and in those quiet Fall evenings, curled up with a book that whispers “you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, and yes, you can heal from this.”
Wrapping up.
Now, I’d love to hear in the comments below:
What are some of the best books that have supported you on your relational trauma recovery journey?
Please leave a message so our community of 25,000 monthly website visitors can benefit from your wisdom.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
Warmly,
Annie
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