Trauma Memoir

Set against a backdrop of East End London, Georgia experienced a childhood few of us could imagine. Though brought up in a loving family, she watched her family break apart through deceit and her mother descend into heroin addiction. Escaping into what she felt was a loving sanctuary, Georgia ended up trapped in a violent relationship with a man who would beat and abuse her. After having her three children by him, she knew she had to escape to finally find safety. Now Georgia is sharing her story of survival to help others and prove there is hope even after trauma and heartache.

From a profoundly troubled childhood comes unflinchingly honest stories of abuse, neglect, violence, isolation, and blatant racism. Through the Storm of Early Trauma is not told from a place of anger or resentment. Instead, it speaks with the voice of hope - that others who have lived such stories, and who are living those stories today, will find their own inner strength to seek the help they need and deserve.

Stay: A Story of Family, Love, and Other Traumas is a riveting debut that captures the joyous and painful complexity of family love and loyalty, the cost of family secrets, and the quest to help the people we love most without losing our own way. It’s also a rare window into two of the biggest epidemics gripping society today: mental illness and chronic illness and the ways in which they affect relationships, personal identity, and the blueprint of our lives.

On a summer night in 1984, 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job at the University of California Police Department and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a man assaults her at knife point. After a soul chilling struggle she manages to escape and call 911. Police catch her assailant, she identifies him, and he is arrested. Fast forward 2014, 30 years after her assault. Why does the body remember what the mind tries so desperately to forget?

In 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design a weekend home for her outside of Chicago. Edith was a woman ahead of her time—unmarried, she was a distinguished medical researcher, as well as an accomplished violinist, translator, and poet. The two quickly began spending weekends together, talking philosophy, Catholic mysticism, and, of course, architecture over wine-soaked picnic lunches.

Hiding in Plain Sight is not another war story or celebration of strength-it's a brutally honest account of how thirty years of service as a veteran and first responder slowly dismantled one man's identity, marriage, and sense of self. Doug White opens up about post-traumatic stress injuries, emotional collapse, and the fallout of a life spent serving others while ignoring his own breaking points. But this isn't a story about trauma-it's a story about growth, honesty, and the long road back to being whole.

Trauma surgeon Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all—gunshot wounds, stabbings, traumatic brain injuries—and ushers us into the trauma bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass. As a Harvard-trained physician, he learned to keep his head down and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow rage when patients told him to take out the trash. Just days after the tragic police shootings of two Black men, he tried to save the lives of officers shot in the deadliest incident for US law enforcement since 9/11.

In 2001, Christine Yanke’s life was turned upside down after police raided her family’s home and arrested her Hells Angel husband. Suddenly an unemployed single mother of three boys, she had to fight to keep her home and family together. For the next three years, her husband awaited a trial that would determine their future together as a family. Blinded by an Angel is the true story of one woman’s struggle to survive mental, physical, and financial hardships.

A book for psychotherapists and their clients — and for anyone who wants to make the journey from shame to unshame. Carolyn Spring, author of ‘Recovery is my best revenge: my experience of trauma, abuse and dissociative identity disorder’, documents in this, her second book, her journey through psychotherapy to heal and resolve trauma-based shame, which had resulted in a catastrophic mental breakdown in her early thirties and an eventual diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID).

Ruth M. Glenn wasn’t surprised the first time her husband beat her. She was hurt and disappointed but after a childhood in a broken and violent home, she was not surprised. After all, this was just the way things were, right? It was only after she lay bleeding in a carwash parking lot, after being shot three times by him, that Glenn resolved—if she managed to survive—to spend the rest of her life standing up to domestic violence.

A simple car accident changed the path of six-year-old Sean Rogers’ life forever. His single mother checked into the hospital as a vibrant young woman and checked out as a full-blown opioid addict. From that day forward, Sean’s life became a silent nightmare of abuse, neglect, chronic hunger, and slow, helpless withdrawal from everything and everyone he loved.

Set against a 20-year dialogue with her mother, Barbara, who suffers from long undiagnosed PTSD, author Elizabeth Wilcox opens her maternal history with the birth of her illegitimate grandmother Violet to a German house servant outside London in 1904. With her mother's encouragement, Wilcox goes on to trace the lives of Violet and her mother, Barbara, both of whom are deeply impacted by maternal separation and the complex trauma they have endured because of war.

Forget everything you think you know about psychedelics. They’re not punchlines. They’re not party favors for aging hippies. Instead, as Alex Abraham discovered, they are an innovative approach that can help heal trauma and chronic pain.

The Romeo & Juliet Delusion provides inspiration to anyone whose life has been touched by addiction or domestic violence. Abbott relies on raw and uninhibited storytelling to convey the methods she used to explore healing and freedom from trauma. Abbott's hope is that by authentically sharing her story, she can help to change the lives of people in similar situations and inspire others to view addiction and domestic abuse with compassion and curiosity.

Growing up, Lisa Nikolidakis tried to make sense of her childhood, which was scarred by abuse, violence, and psychological terrors so extreme that her relationship with her father was cleaved beyond repair. Having finally been able to leave that relationship behind, surviving meant forgetting. For years, “I’m fine” was a lie Nikolidakis repeated. Then, on her twenty-seventh birthday, Nikolidakis’s father murdered his girlfriend and her daughter, and turned the gun on himself.

At the start of this remarkable story of recovery, healing, and redemption, Ginger Gaffney answers a call to help retrain the troubled horses at an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico, a facility run entirely by the prisoners. The horses are scavenging through the dumpsters, kicking and running down the residents when they bring the trash out after meals. One horse is severely injured. The horses and residents arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many: the horses are defensive and terrified, while the residents, some battling addictions, are emotionally and physically shattered.

David Giffen was once a defrocked priest. Having spent a decade as an Anglican cleric in Southwestern Ontario, David served in leadership in three urban social-justice focused appointments as a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada. David was deprived of ministry and terminated from his appointment as incumbent priest of his parish on December 12th, 2018. He was in his fourth month on medical leave. David was formally accused, investigated and found guilty of sexual misconduct, all while he was drugged out, melting down on social media.

Carmen Aguirre has lived many lives, all of them to the fullest. At age six she was a Chilean refugee adjusting to life as a Latina in North America. At 18 she was a revolutionary dissident. In her early 20s she fought to find her voice as an actor and to break away from the stereotypical roles thrust upon her - Housekeeper, Hotel Maid, Mexican Hooker #1.

Emotionally battered and neglected by her personality disordered parents—and manipulated by Mormon beliefs—16-year-old Sarah was convinced her boyfriend Michael would save her. When her parents discovered that they’d committed the sin of premarital sex, the aftermath left the teenagers irrevocably bonded.

Having struggled with gut-wrenching depression, a broken back, sexual abuse, a severe eating disorder, attempted suicide, and a brain aneurysm - all before she was 18 - Dawn learned to become a fighter and survivor. Her deepest desire is to turn everyone she meets into their own rock star through her strategy based coaching practice.