As my holiday gift to you I am sharing a round-up of my favorite parenting and trauma-informed books of 2022! These books are not necessarily published in 2022, and they are not mentioned in any particular order. I also do NOT receive any compensation for suggesting them.
BEST TRAUMA-INFORMED BOOKS OF 2022 ACCORDING TO ME:
- The Seven Core Issues Workbook, by my friend and revered colleague, Allison Davis Maxon and Sharon Roszia.
From the back cover:
Based on a hugely successful US model, The Seven Core Issues Workbook is accessible and parent-friendly with brief explanations, activities, and exercises.
The Seven Core Issues are Loss, Rejection, Shame/Guilt, Grief, Identity, Intimacy, and Mastery/Control. The workbook gives parents the ability to explore their own issues as well as their child’s through various experiential exercises and activities. Parents can identify and address their core issues in order to more effectively assist and support the child’s core issues.
The workbook and its exercises allow for a variety of diverse groups to use the book with ease, making it the essential tool for all individuals to grow and heal themselves and their
families.
- What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey.
From the back cover:
Our earliest experiences shape our lives far down the road, and What Happened to You? provides powerful scientific and emotional insights into the behavioral patterns that many of us struggle to understand.
“Through this lens, we can build a renewed sense of personal self-worth and ultimately recalibrate our responses to circumstances, situations, and relationships. It is, in other words, the key to reshaping our very lives.” (Oprah Winfrey)
This book is going to change the way you see your life.
Have you ever wondered, “Why did I do that?” or “Why can’t I just control my behavior?” Others may judge our reactions and think, “What’s wrong with that person?” When questioning our emotions, it’s easy to place the blame on ourselves, holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It’s time we started asking a different question.
Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”
Here, Winfrey shares stories from her past, understanding through experience the vulnerability that comes from facing trauma and adversity at a young age. In conversation throughout the audiobook, she and Dr. Perry focus on understanding people, behavior, and ourselves. It’s a subtle but profound shift in our approach to trauma, and it allows us to understand our pasts in order to clear a path to our future – opening the door to resilience and healing in a proven, powerful way.
- Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children’s Behavioral Challenges, by Mona Delahooke, PhD.
From the back cover:
A new approach to solving behavioral challenges.
In Beyond Behaviors, internationally known pediatric psychologist Dr. Mona Delahooke describes behaviors as the tip of the iceberg, important signals that we should address by seeking to understand a child’s individual differences in the context of relational safety.
This accessible book offers professionals, educators, and parents tools and techniques to reduce behavioral challenges and promote psychological resilience and satisfying, secure relationships.
Neuroscience-based effective tools and strategies for children labeled with: Conduct Disorder; Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD); Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD); Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD); Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD); Anxiety and Depression; and Autism and Developmental or Learning Differences.
And children who experience or have experienced: aggressive, confusing and unpredictable behaviors; tantrums and meltdowns; disconnection or shutdown; adverse childhood experiences; and trauma and toxic stress.
- It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, by Mark Wolynn.
From the back cover:
Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experiences or in chemical imbalances in our brains – but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited: that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations.
It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.
As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over 20 years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that, in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.
What I’m reading in 2023 – I can’t wait to see my reaction to this book! Have you read it yet? If so, reach out so we can discuss.
- Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women’s Trauma Against Them
From the back cover:
Angry, opinionated, mouthy, aggressive, hysterical, mad, disordered, crazy, psycho, delusional, borderline, hormonal . . . Women have long been pathologized, locked up and medicated for not conforming to whichever norms or stereotypes are expected of them in that time and space. Sexy But Psycho is a challenging and uncomfortable book which seeks to explore the way professionals and society at large pathologize and sexualize women and girls.
That’s it for now! For more free content on childhood trauma, hop over to my blog or my resources page. If you found this content valuable, please share it with a friend or subscribe to my monthly newsletter at BethTyson.com.
Lastly…Did you know I published a children’s book for kinship families? It’s called, A Grandfamily for Sullivan. It has 135 five-star reviews on Amazon and you can learn more or purchase a copy for someone special here.