7 Must-Read Books If You’re Serious About Healing
By: Leah O'Daniel
Tags: Healing From Trauma, Book Recommendations, Adult Children, Intergenerational Trauma, Parenting

There is little room in today’s world of mental health for an argument to be made that you do not have to go to therapy. I’m going to make one anyway. For starters, finding the right fit therapist in the right niche is hard. Emotionally draining. Traumatic even. While I love that societal norms surrounding the shame stigma when it comes to mental health are starting to shift, I hate what has happened in the profession.

What I mean is that rather than most insurance companies covering licensed therapists, they cover companies that hire professionals with MA in Social Work, for example instead. I am not knocking this necessarily, but it is no substitute for, say, trauma-informed therapy or EDMR (eye movement desensitization reprocessing) used for the treatment of PTSD. The mere act of attempting to navigate this confusing system is just that, confusing.

For me, an INFJ, a military spouse that moves every 2 years, with more childhood baggage than a decade worth of moves, mental health care is not a simple task. For one thing, I know that I struggle with emotional abandonment issues. I am extremely introverted. I struggle to trust, and I certainly do not open up to just any ol’ person, regardless of their title. For another thing, establishing a therapy relationship is an intimate endeavor. By the time I have found a therapist that is a good fit for me and started to open, we are almost always set to move again shortly thereafter. Then factoring the sheer amount of energy, it takes to explain issues that are specific to military families with non-military therapists.

I was caught in this cycle for years before I eventually abandoned it altogether. It became too exhausting and traumatic to do repeatedly. Then, after years of recurrent miscarriages, a decision to give up trying, settling into, and loving our childless life, I got pregnant. I waited with bated breath to exhale, knowing fully this would end too from the beginning. It did not. At least, not like the others. Instead, my sweet Eliot made it all the way past 20 weeks and then died after being born too prematurely due to failed medical care (re they turned me away, in labor, for “first-time mom” jitters multiple times).

I hit rock bottom. I hit whatever is below rock bottom. Center of the Earth, depths of hell, I don’t know which, but it felt like both to me. At the behest of everyone around me, I started up on my old familiar therapist search once again. The first one could only repeat to me that she was so sorry because she could not imagine. The second one told me that all things happen in God’s timing. The third one told me I should not focus on the death of my child and the trauma from it but rather, on having another baby instead. The grief was so overwhelming that I quit for almost 8 months after that. I could not muster the energy to repeat this process of finding a therapist when it had failed so many times before.

Instead, I started reading. Eventually, cracking open these books lead me to find a trauma-informed therapist and that was life-changing. But, if you, like me, find yourself unable to open up in a stuffy office or without the ability to access therapy at all, try these seven books first.