Listed in this section is a selection of self help books that will hopefully inspire you. These books can teach us a new skill or open our minds. Self-help books can help guide you as you seek to make changes to your day-to-day life while giving you the freedom to make those changes at your own pace.
Feel free to let me know of any books you have read that helped you that you think could be added to this list. I also find audiobooks a great way to enjoy my books.
I also find audiobooks a great way to enjoy my books. Click here for the membership link Audible offers a trial for 30 days. You get to have one free book which you can keep, even if you cancel.
Please note that by using my links here I will get a small commission of what you decide to buy. This enables me to continue to provide free content but won’t cost you any extra.
List of Books Recommended
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma – Pete Walker
This book is a practical, user-friendly self-help guide to recovering from the lingering effects of childhood trauma, and to achieving a rich and fulfilling life. It is copiously illustrated with examples of my own and my clients’ journeys of recovering.
This book is also for those who do not have Complex PTSD but want to understand and help a loved one who does.
The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame – Pete Walker
This book is a handbook for increasing your emotional intelligence. Moreover, if you are a survivor of a dysfunctional family, it is a guide for repairing the damage done to your emotional nature in childhood. As such it is actually a sequel to his later book: Complex PTSD from Surviving To Thriving.
The Tao of Fully Feeling focuses primarily on the emotional healing level of trauma recovery. It is a safe handbook for grieving losses of childhood.
The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma – Bessel van der Kolk
The effects of trauma can be devastating for sufferers, their families and future generations.
Here one of the world’s experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for treatment, moving away from standard talking and drug therapies and towards an alternative approach that heals mind, brain and body.
‘Van der Kolk draws on thirty years of experience to argue powerfully that trauma is one of the West’s most urgent public health issues … Packed with science and human stories’ New Scientist
Healing the Shame That Binds You – John Bradshaw
In an emotionally revealing way, John Bradshaw shows us how toxic shame is the core problem in our compulsions, co-dependencies, addictions, and the drive to super-achieve.
The result is a breakdown in the family system and our inability to go forward with our lives. We are bound by our shame.
Drawing from his decades of experience as a counselor, Bradshaw offers us the techniques to heal this shame. Using affirmations, visualizations, “inner voice” and “feeling” work plus guided meditations and other useful healing techniques, he realeases the shame that binds us to the past
Ancient Remedies for Modern Life – Dr Josh Axe
Bestselling author Dr. Axe explores the foundational concepts of ancient healing – eating right for your type and living in sync with your circadian clock.
Readers will learn how traditional practitioners identified the root cause of each patient’s illness, then treated it with medicinal herbs, mushrooms, CBD, essential oils and restorative mind-body practices.
What’s more, they’ll discover how they can use these ancient treatments themselves to cope with dozens of diseases, from ADHD to diabetes, hypothyroidism, autoimmune disease and beyond.
A Practical Guide to Complex Ptsd: Compassionate Strategies to Begin Healing from Childhood Trauma – Arielle Schwartz PhD
Repetitive trauma during childhood can impact your emotional development, creating a ripple effect that carries into adulthood.
Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) is a physical and psychological response to these repeated traumatic events.
A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD contains research-based strategies, tools, and support for individuals working to heal from their childhood trauma. You don’t have to be a prisoner of your past.
Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers – Karyl McBride
Within these pages, you will find an invitation to see yourself as the hero or heroine of your own life journey.
A hero’s journey involves walking into the darkness on a quest for wholeness. This interactive format calls for journaling and self-reflection, with practices that guide you beyond the pain of your past and help you discover a sense of meaning and purpose in your life.
Successful navigation of a hero’s journey provides opportunities to discover that you are more powerful than you had previously realized.
Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within – Byron Brown
Liberate yourself from the limitations and judgments imposed by your inner critic, and develop “soul qualities” to experience freedom and vitality.
Whether we call it the inner critic or the superego, most of us have a judge within who nags us and is constantly on our case.
Byron Brown provides a comprehensive guide to understanding how the inner critic works as well as practical, positive suggestions for breaking free of it.
Using straightforward language and everyday examples, you’ll explore:
Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences – Peter A. Levine
It asks and answers an intriguing question: why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized?
By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals virtually immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed.
Waking the Tiger normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events.
To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us focus on bodily sensations. Through heightened awareness of these sensations, trauma can be healed.
The Feel Good Factor: 10 proven ways to boost your mood and motivate yourself – Patrick Holford
THE FEEL GOOD FACTOR. Written by leading nutrition expert and mental health specialist Patrick Holford, it reveals highly effective methods to make a difference to how you feel – without the need for medical drugs.
It includes lifestyle and life management techniques, as well as revealing the right foods to eat, and those to avoid, to help improve your mood dramatically.
The Chimp Paradox: The Acclaimed Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness –
Prof Steve Peters
THE FEEL GOOD FACTOR. Written by leading nutrition expert and mental health specialist Patrick Holford, it reveals highly effective methods to make a difference to how you feel – without the need for medical drugs.
It includes lifestyle and life management techniques, as well as revealing the right foods to eat, and those to avoid, to help improve your mood dramatically.
Homecoming Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child – John Bradshaw
In this book, John offers a new way to connect, reclaim, and nurture your inner child. You must do the work suggested if you want to experience change.
It is up to the adult part of you to decide to do this work.
Even while you are in your child state, your adult self will still know exactly where you are and what you are doing.
Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families (Recovery Classics Edition) Kindle Edition by Charles Whitfield
Dr. Whitfield provides a clear and effective introduction to the basic principles of recovery.
This book is a modern classic, as fresh and useful today as it was more than a decade ago when first published.
Here, frontline physician and therapist Charles Whitfield describe the process of wounding that the Child Within (True Self) experiences and shows how to differentiate the True Self from the false self. He also describes the core issues of recovery and more.