A Literary Prescription for

Trauma

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.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Books on what trauma does to the body, and how it heals.

My Grandmother’s Hands

Resmaa Menakem · 2017

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.

What My Bones Know

Stephanie Foo · 2022

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

Pete Walker · 2013

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.

The Deepest Well

Nadine Burke Harris · 2018

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.”

It Didn’t Start with You

Mark Wolynn · 2016

Wolynn traces how trauma travels down through families, often resurfacing in a descendant as an unexplained fear, pattern, or ache with no obvious cause in their own life. Where the other books here focus on what happened to you directly, this one widens the lens to the inherited shape of it — useful alongside them, not instead of them, especially if family history feels tangled up in your own.

The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 1982

Celie survives unspeakable abuse and betrayal and, letter by letter, writes her way into a voice, then a self, then a life she chose. It remains one of fiction’s most fully earned portraits of a person who was nearly erased and got herself back anyway.

Poems about trauma

For when prose is not enough

Poems that take the body’s memory seriously.

“Survivors” (extract)

Siegfried Sassoon, 1917

No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they’re “longing to go out again,”—
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.

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.

Get this quote as a print →

“On Pain” (extract)

Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet, 1923

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
...And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

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.

Shop Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet prints →

“The Soul has Bandaged moments” (extract)

Emily Dickinson, c.1862

The Soul has Bandaged moments —
When too appalled to stir —
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her.

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.

Get this quote as a print →

Quotes & Prose

Quotes about trauma to keep

For what the body is still holding.

It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember.

Bessel van der Kolk

Get this quote as a print →

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

Audre Lorde

Get this quote as a print →

Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships. It cannot occur in isolation.

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

Get this quote as a print →

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Maya Angelou

Shop Maya Angelou prints →

What happened to you is not the truest thing about you. It is something that happened to the truest thing about you, which is still there, still yours to reclaim.

Georgia Clare

Shop Georgia Clare prints →

From Georgia

Pause here, if you need to

A short practice for sitting with trauma, whenever you need somewhere to land.

Calm Your Nervous System When You Feel Overwhelmed

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A breath-led practice for when stress becomes physical, guiding your nervous system out of high alert and into something steadier.

Listen Now For Free

The Inner Peace Toolkit

Digital Self-Care Toolkit · Georgia Clare

2 guided meditations, an Inner Peace Journal, an affirmations eBook, 10 printable affirmation prints and 10 calming phone wallpapers — small daily practices to come back to whenever you need to slow down and reconnect with yourself.

Explore the Toolkit →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice — gently softening how you meet stress, anxiety and overwhelm, one day at a time.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Trauma

Where should I start?

If you only read one thing, begin with My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem. 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. And if a whole book feels like too much today, scroll to the poems below — “The Soul has Bandaged moments” by Emily Dickinson can be read in a minute and asks nothing of you.

What can I read when trauma makes it hard to concentrate?

Start with the short forms on this page — the poems and the lines to keep — rather than a whole book. A poem or a single quote asks very little of you, and you don’t have to read in order, or finish anything.

Which quotes about trauma are worth keeping?

Quotes about trauma worth keeping include “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) and “Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships. It cannot occur in isolation.” (Judith Herman). You’ll find these and more in the quotes section above.

Can reading really help with trauma?

It genuinely can. A book won’t undo trauma, but the right one makes you feel less alone in it — someone else has felt this exact thing and found words for it, and being understood, even by a stranger on a page, is its own quiet relief.

Trauma

Prescribed reading

For when prose is not enough

Quotes about trauma to keep

Pause here, if you need to

Reading for Trauma

Where should I start?

What can I read when trauma makes it hard to concentrate?

Which quotes about trauma are worth keeping?

Can reading really help with trauma?

More prescriptions await.