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11 Books for Healing Childhood Trauma and Dealing with Toxic Parents
If you’re recovering from a traumatic past, it can be difficult to find helpful resources that validate your experience. Some well-meaning people will tell you to move on, forgive, go exercise, etc. without realizing that they are dismissing, minimizing, and invalidating the victim, which can easily re-traumatize a person. It took me over 4 years to find the proper resources that helped me to see my childhood and adulthood with more objective understanding.
Below are a few books that can shed some light on childhood trauma, abusive parenting (this includes verbal, emotional, and physical abuse), emotional incest, family enmeshment, neglect, people pleasing, trauma bonding, and real healing.
The truth is even though we have a lot of nature shows about animals tending to their young, a large percentage of human beings have no idea how to raise their children. Parents pass on abuse from one generation to another, teaching them that hitting, spanking, and breaking a child’s will is the only way to teach them to be a good human being. It’s been my experience that what we don’t heal and confront comes back through repetition compulsion, addiction, and can even cause disease in the body.
We pass on misguided beliefs about human life to others. And if Covid-19 and quarantine has taught us anything, it is to become more responsible and aware of our own emotions. These books help to end the cycle of abuse. If you grew up in a toxic family, it can be difficult to distinguish whether you were abused or not. I hope these books are helpful to you.
- Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship by Christine Ann Lawson. To date, this has been the most helpful book in helping me to understand the family dynamics in a toxic family. I had an extremely difficult relationship with my mother and this book made me feel seen and heard.
- Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson. I found this book to be helpful overall. It repeated, condensed, and summarized topics that I read in other books into one cohesive book.
- Whole Again: Healing Your Heart and Rediscovering Your True Self After Toxic Relationships and…
