Recommendations
Books Like The Body Keeps the Score
Best books to read after The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
The Body Keeps the Score is the most comprehensive account of trauma science ever written for a general audience — arguing that trauma is stored in the body as altered physiology and that healing requires somatic approaches alongside cognitive ones. These 8 books extend into trauma therapy, neuroscience, the psychology of PTSD, and the memoir literature of surviving trauma.
- 1Buy
Trauma and Recovery
by Judith Lewis Herman
Herman's foundational 1992 account of the psychology of trauma — establishing the conceptual framework that Van der Kolk builds on and extending with two decades of additional neuroscience and treatment research. The canonical predecessor.
- 2Buy
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About
by Michele Filgate
A collection of essays by sixteen writers about the things they cannot discuss with their mothers — including many essays that directly engage the silences, secrets, and generational transmissions that produce trauma in families, illustrating the interpersonal dimension of Van der Kolk's physiological account.
- 3Buy
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
by Lori Gottlieb
Therapist Lori Gottlieb's account of simultaneously entering therapy herself and treating her own patients — a narrative account of what psychotherapy actually looks like from both sides, providing the experiential frame for the treatment approaches Van der Kolk recommends.
- 4Buy
The Developing Mind
by Daniel J. Siegel
Neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel's account of how early relational experience shapes brain development — the neuroscience of attachment and early trauma that provides the developmental framework for Van der Kolk's account of how trauma becomes embedded in body and brain.
- 5Buy
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
by Gabor Maté
Canadian physician Gabor Maté's account of addiction among Vancouver's homeless population — arguing that addiction is almost always rooted in childhood trauma and the attempt to escape emotional pain, providing the addiction-medicine application of Van der Kolk's trauma framework.
- 6Buy
Waking the Tiger
by Peter A. Levine
Somatic psychologist Peter Levine's account of how animals naturally release trauma by completing the defensive responses that were interrupted during the threatening event, and how humans can learn to do the same — the somatic therapy companion to Van der Kolk's broader account.
- 7Buy
The Deepest Well
by Nadine Burke Harris
Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris's account of how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) embed themselves in children's bodies as toxic stress — altering immune function, hormonal regulation, and brain architecture — providing the public health perspective on the biological mechanisms Van der Kolk describes.
- 8Buy
Educated
by Tara Westover
Tara Westover's memoir of escaping a survivalist family in rural Idaho — a first-person account of surviving childhood trauma, dissociation, and the process of building a self after extreme early experiences, demonstrating the lived experience of what Van der Kolk documents scientifically.
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