Best Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Books of 2025

The Body Keeps the Score is a #1 New York Times bestseller by Bessel van der Kolk that transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing. Dr. van der Kolk uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. The book is filled with science and human stories, making it an intense yet moving read. Overall, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding and treating traumatic stress and the scope of its impact on society.

This book, titled "How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing," offers a new perspective on cleaning and organizing that frees readers from feeling ashamed or overwhelmed by a messy home. Author KC Davis presents a revolutionary approach to housekeeping that emphasizes self-compassion and simplification of to-do lists. Her practical advice helps readers prioritize tasks, avoid procrastination, and find creative shortcuts to transform a messy room into a functional space. This book is an excellent resource for anyone struggling with anxiety, fatigue, depression, ADHD, or lack of support in managing their household.

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook is a practical guide for learning mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. It offers evidence-based exercises for building skills in these four key areas, making them accessible to both mental health professionals and general readers. The fully revised and updated second edition includes new chapters on cognitive rehearsal, distress tolerance, and self-compassion. Overall, this book provides a clear and effective approach to learning DBT skills that can greatly improve one's ability to handle distress without losing control. It is a valuable resource for anyone seeking real and lasting change.

What Happened to You? by Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry is a #1 New York Times bestseller that offers powerful insights into the behavioral patterns resulting from our earliest experiences. By shifting our focus from "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?", the book provides a profound approach to understanding trauma, behavior, and ourselves. Winfrey shares her own experiences, making the book a deeply personal and relatable read. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand and heal from past traumas.

The "DBT® Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets, Second Edition" is a valuable resource for clients who are learning dialectical behavior therapy skills, and those who treat them. This updated manual provides more than 225 user-friendly handouts and worksheets, which have been demonstrated effective in treating a wide range of psychological and emotional problems. The book's flexible approach allows practitioners and treatment adopters to tailor the skills to meet their clients' specific needs. Mental health professionals will also benefit from the author's DBT® Skills Training Manual, Second Edition, which provides complete instructions for teaching the skills. Overall, this book is an essential tool for anyone interested in learning and implementing DBT skills.

This book offers a groundbreaking approach to transforming traumatic legacies passed down in families over generations. Mark Wolynn, an acclaimed expert in the field of inherited family trauma, provides fresh and powerful tools for relieving the suffering caused by such trauma. Wolynn's method, the Core Language Approach, provides diagnostic self-inventories and visualization techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree. The book offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to this method, which can help readers uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Overall, "It Didn't Start with You" is a wise and trustworthy guide on the journey toward healing.

The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté is a thought-provoking investigation into the causes of illness and a critique of how our society breeds disease. Maté argues that trauma, stress, and the pressures of modern-day living are often ignored in Western medicine, resulting in chronic illnesses and general ill health. The book offers a compassionate guide for health and healing, connecting the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society. The Myth of Normal is a must-read for anyone interested in personal transformation and self-help books.

The #1 bestseller, "Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself," is a modern classic that offers a clear path to break old patterns, maintain healthy boundaries, and say no to unhealthy relationships. Melody Beattie's compassionate and insightful look into codependency has helped millions of readers understand that they are powerless to change anyone but themselves and that caring for the self is where healing begins. This book is even more relevant today, as readers confront new, urgent challenges with greater self-awareness, than it was when it first entered the national conversation over 35 years ago. Highly recommended for those seeking a lifetime of healing, hope, and happiness.

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma by Pete Walker is a highly recommended book for anyone dealing with the aftermath of childhood trauma. The author, a licensed Marriage and Family psychotherapist, draws from his own 40-year journey of recovering from Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Cptsd) to provide a practical and compassionate guide to recovery. His eclectic and Relational approach to therapy is highly enriched by his own experience, making this book a unique resource for those in need of guidance. Overall, this book is a valuable tool for anyone on the path to healing.

Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice is a powerful manifesto by Judith L. Herman, one of America's most influential psychiatrists. The book argues that the conventional retributive process fails to serve most survivors of sexual violence and trauma, and offers an alternative vision of justice as healing for survivors and their communities. Herman commits the radical act of listening to survivors and recounts their stories to envision a new path to justice for all. This deeply researched and compassionately told book is a vital text for understanding the processes that underlie trauma and recovery.