Van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score" and Whitfield's "Healing the Child Within" are the most helpful abuse recovery books I've ever found. I'm still working through the exercises and lessons of each of them, and I'll be working through them for a while yet. "Healing the Child Within" actually does have a step-by-step guide to self-parenting and integrating the wounded inner child, and "The Body Keeps the Score" is one of the most respected guides to identifying and healing trauma stored in the body. I started working through them last winter as I continue in therapy, and I'm very grateful to have found them. My biggest challenge has been continuing to work through them because each of these books bring up my deepest pain and sorrow. Trauma and inner child work are very difficult and exhausting, and it's horribly unfair that it's even necessary to do this work in the first place. But the alternative is to live an incomplete life.