A Literary Prescription for
For what the body remembers long after the mind has tried to move on.
Trauma is not only the dramatic, named events that make it into films. It is anything that overwhelmed your capacity to cope at the time and never quite finished happening inside you, however ordinary it might look from the outside. The books, poems, and words gathered here are for the slow, unglamorous work of feeling safe in your own body again, at whatever pace that actually takes.
“Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you.”Gabor Maté
Books
Books on what trauma does to the body, and how it heals.
Menakem, a therapist, looks specifically at racialised trauma and how it lodges in the body across generations, offering somatic exercises alongside his analysis rather than theory alone. It is a book about trauma that refuses to stay only in the head, insisting the body has its own memory and its own slow path to release.
Foo, a radio producer, was diagnosed with complex PTSD in her thirties and set out to understand a condition her own doctors could barely explain to her. Her memoir is unusually clear-headed about both the science and the experience of it, written by someone determined to actually understand the thing that was happening to her.
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving
Walker, a therapist who lived through his own complex trauma, writes directly to readers still in the grip of it, naming symptoms many had never seen described accurately anywhere else. It is a dense, practical book, the kind people tend to underline heavily rather than read once and shelve.
Burke Harris, a paediatrician turned public health official, lays out the research connecting early adversity to long-term physical illness, making the case that trauma is a medical issue as much as a psychological one. It is a useful book for anyone who has been made to feel that their lingering symptoms are “just in their head.”
Poetry
Poems that take the body’s memory seriously.
“Survivors” (extract)
Siegfried Sassoon, 1917
Sassoon, writing from a military hospital treating shell-shock during the First World War, captures the gap between how quickly the world expects recovery and how slowly it actually happens. The line between “they’ll soon get well” and what the body is actually still carrying has not gone away in a century.
“On Pain” (extract)
Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet, 1923
Gibran does not ask anyone to be grateful for their pain, only to let it do the slow, unglamorous work of cracking open something that needed cracking. It is one of the gentler frames available for an experience that usually arrives without any framing at all.
“The Soul has Bandaged moments” (extract)
Emily Dickinson, c.1862
Dickinson describes the soul moving between paralysing fear and sudden, dancing escape, which is as accurate a description of trauma’s unpredictable rhythm as anything written since. She does not resolve the tension, which is itself a kind of honesty.
Quotes & Prose
For what the body is still holding.
It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember.
Bessel van der Kolk
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
Audre Lorde
Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.
Peter A. Levine
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya Angelou
Healing is not a return to who you were before. It is an introduction to who you are now.
Georgia Clare