Trauma Memoir

I Had A Brother Once is a brilliant, genre-defying work - both memoir and epic poem - about the struggle for wisdom, grace, and ritual in the face of unspeakable loss. Adam is forced to re-remember a brother he thought he knew and to reckon with a ghost, confronting his unsettled family history, his distant relationship with tradition and faith, and his desperate need to understand an event that always slides just out of his grasp.

To others, Dr. Lawrence Mieczkowski (Dr. Mitch) was a successful physician, caring father, and good husband—but inwardly, he was suffering from deep despair. When the 1999 Columbine shootings triggered a descent into near madness, he lost his ability to fight off the demons dragging him further into the darkness of depression and hopelessness. Something had to be done.

Lifted from Shame offers hope as it recounts the story of the author's journey to understand shame and trust Jesus and His grace after a trauma-filled childhood. Louise Sedgwick grew up in a family where involvement in conservative Bible churches hid the severe sexual abuse that went on behind closed doors. Fear and shame dominated her thoughts, producing confusion about God and her worth. Relational performance and striving to be all God wanted her to be resulted in an ongoing personal sense of failure. Nothing seemed to free her.

One of life's biggest cliches becomes a horrific reality when Douglas Segal's wife and young daughter are hit head-on by a Los Angeles city bus. Miraculously, his daughter was unharmed, but his wife faced a series of life-threatening injuries. Following the accident, Segal began sending regular email updates to their circle of friends and family - a list that continued to grow as others heard of the event. Segal's compelling memoir is an intimate and honest chronicle built around these email updates and is a profound example of how people show up for one another in times of crisis.

At age four, Diana manages her family's banking, grocery shops alone, and befriends the town drunk. Her father is too busy chasing skirts and throwing fits to notice what she does. And her mom is too mentally absent to properly parent. While Diana's narcissistic dad terrorizes and exploits her, she works harder to please him. Estill, an award-winning humor author, shares an honest and comedic look at her dysfunctional childhood. As an adult, she struggles to reclaim her power while caring for her dementia-impaired dad.

E. Lynn Harris writes the memoir of his life - from his childhood in Arkansas as a closeted gay boy through his struggling days as a self-published author to his rise as a New York Times best-selling author. In What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, Harris shares an extraordinary life touched by loneliness and depression, but, more important, he reveals the triumphant life of a small-town dreamer who was able through writing to make his dreams - and more - come true.

As a journalist, Leigh Sales often encounters people experiencing the worst moments of their lives in the full glare of the media. But one particular string of bad news stories - and a terrifying brush with her own mortality - sent her looking for answers about how vulnerable each of us is to a life-changing event. What are our chances of actually experiencing one? What do we fear most and why? And when the worst does happen, what comes next?

If Jenn had known her husband's family before they'd gotten married, there might never have been a wedding at all. Now she has to confront the reality that her new family holds ignorant—and, at times, racist—views, and that spending time around them triggers her ingrained trauma of growing up Black in the U.S. Why is it so hard for her to speak out against their prejudice? And, more importantly, what does it mean that her husband is silent in the face of all this?

Growing up with Autism is hard enough. Growing up with Autism when you're a little gay weirdo is almost impossible. Greatest Hits of my Childhood Trauma is the story of a boy fighting to exist in a world that would rather throw him away. From overly religious mothers to prison sentences, drug overdoses, psychiatric facilities, bizarre sexual encounters, and queer high school romance, this tale of 90s middle America is heartbreaking, hilarious, and hard to put down. Alex Dark takes us through the darkest parts of his life with a charm that will keep you coming back for more.

With poignant prose and a deeply authentic personal story, this harrowing account exposes the stark and painful realities of childhood abuse, painting a heart-breaking picture of the lasting pain and fear that it inflicts on its victims. Spanning 30 years, in this coming-of-age memoir, author Christina Vitagliano recounts in vivid detail the frightening nights spent when her father loomed in the doorway of her bedroom, along with the psychological toll that the relentless familial abuse took on her psyche.

This audiobook chronicles the triumphs and failures of his surgical life. Having spent his childhood in the backstreets of a northern steel town, he went on to become one of the world's foremost heart surgeons. His drive for perfection in his profession took him to the world-renowned Harefield Hospital, the foremost heart surgery centre in Birmingham, Alabama and the newly-created Cardiothoracic Centre in Oxford. Then in 2019 in Wuhan he was the first Western doctor to learn about Covid-19 before the virus was identified.

If you are born into ineffable darkness, can you even comprehend the light? Take one-part volatile home life, two-parts haphazard nomadic existence, zero-parts social connection, and shake well. Our protagonist's only constant is unpredictability: that, and the charismatic, fundamentalist hammerings from the pulpit. But, when a sheltered child goes nuclear? Just pray you are far from the exclusion zone.

A Buddhist psychotherapist uses her understanding of suffering to confront her own trauma history, as she comes to terms with the truth of what happened to her in childhood. Trauma survivors and people who live with disability will find refuge in this audiobook.

A searing memoir about growing up in a fiercely loving, abusive rabbinical family in which the author's father, the charismatic head of a splinter Orthodox religious community, demands unswerving loyalty—and a commitment to guarding terrible secrets. Sara Sherbill was raised by a father who was both a representative of God and a broken man harboring an intricate set of secrets. Her riveting story explores what happens when a daughter is tasked with keeping those secrets, and the cost of keeping them. It asks: How do we live with suffering? What does it mean to heal?

Rising to accept a prestigious award, Jody Lulich wondered what to say. Describe how caring for helpless, voiceless animals in his own shame and pain provided a lifeline, a chance to heal himself as well? Lulich tells his story in In the Company of Grace, a memoir about finding courage in compassion and strength in healing-and power in finally confronting the darkness of his youth.

This book pairs my erotica with the true story of my intimate relationships and then adds my analysis of the main themes around trauma, emotional skills, and authenticity. Nietzsche said, "That which doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger." My story bears this out on more than one occasion. My erotica is as intense and challenging as my life story. It is full of BDSM, fetish, and power-exchange dynamics. The lines between the fantasy and my lived reality are easy to blur.

Riveting, honest, and raw, I Can Take It From Here recounts Lisa Forbes's harrowing journey into darkness—including a fourteen-year-long stint in a maximum-security prison—and her fierce resolve to understand the effects of the trauma she endured, to take personal responsibility for her actions, and to ensure that her history does not dictate her destiny.

An affecting memoir-in-essays from the acclaimed author of Goodbye, Sweet Girl, The Answer Is in the Wound is a radical examination of the frac­tured, nonlinear nature of life after trauma. In this remarkable account of her own road to healing, Kelly Sundberg challenges a culture in which violence against women is normalized and writes against the implicit demand for sur­vivors to “get over it.”

This is a deeply personal story of a sister who lost her brother to a fentanyl overdose. Tiff Carson found her brother Cory’s struggle with addiction frustrating and impossible to understand until he chose to use his voice.

In 1974, Liz Harvie – born Claire Elaine Watts – was given up for adoption by her birth mother Yvonne. Claire was just eight weeks old when her adoptive parents took her in – and renamed her Elizabeth. Although brought up in a ‘perfect’ household, the emotional – and physical – trauma of being taken from her biological mother would never leave Liz. She constantly wondered: what does my real mum look like? Will she come back for me? Why did she abandon me?