Because Awful Things Happen (Trauma)
One book that is considered a classic is Judith Herman’s Trauma & Recovery. It’s an academic text, but still very readable.
If you have lived through a lot of hard knocks, then you may feel cursed by it all. Christine Courtois’ book It’s Not You, It’s What Happened to You is a book for the general public about understanding what’s called “complex trauma.”
One of the things that helped move the study of trauma forward in recent years is neuroscience. Being able to see and study how psychological experiences literally change both the brain and the body has been a watershed. A good book that summarizes many of these new discoveries is The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk.
When bad things happen to the people around us, it reverberates in our lives. If you are someone, like a nurse or a first responder, who is regularly exposed to the suffering of others, you may experience what’s called “secondary trauma”. A good book for learning how to cope with this kind of exposure is Trauma Stewardship by Laura Vandernoot-Lipsky. It stands on its merits, but the cartoons help, too.
Another great resource online is Safe Space Radio (safespaceradio.com). This podcast, hosted by a Harvard trained psychiatrist, features a wide variety of interviews about difficult topics. They’re not all specifically trauma related, but as the tag line explains, they are “subjects we’d struggle with less if we talked about them more.”
Something of a buzzword in the field these days is “resilience” which is about how people bounce back. Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges by Steven Southwick and Dennis Charney summarizes recent research in accessible chapters.
Sometimes, when life goes to hell, it makes the whole thing seem meaningless. Victor Frankel was a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who went through the worst of what life had to offer. He came out of it with clarity about our struggle to make meaning. His most popular and accessible book is Man’s Search for Meaning.