[JenKat]

I have been diagnosed with PTSD for a couple years now, but I've done fairly well at suppressing my emotions from it until recently. These past three weeks the memories, flashbacks, panic attacks, and general anxiety have made life rather tough for me. I see a therapist twice a week, but still I would like to be able to get some help with coping almost everyday until this gets more under control. I'm an avid reader and find that books are one of the best ways to help me heal, so I would like to buy a few to help me get through this tough time. Does anyone have recommendations? I would really appreciate the advice

[CedarS]

If you have access to a public library I suggest looking through their catalog and checking out anything on PTSD that looks interesting. Then when a book particularly works for you , you can buy a copy at a bookstore if you want.

That is what helped me the most, I don't have any specific titles to suggest, various books helped at various times.

[pachyderm]

I like Growing Beyond Survival by Elizabeth Vermilyea. It is a self-help workbook.

[Perna]

I like Children Changed by Trauma: A Healing Guide by Debra Whiting Alexander.

It's for how to help a child but is written well and is very comforting to read "as-if" to yourself. Has information and lists and ways to relate to a traumatized child and I really liked it for myself. It does help heal like its title says. It's basic but engaging and step-by-step. I wish the knowledge had been know when I originally had troubles.

[sunrise]

When I first began therapy, my therapist recommended Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter Levine. This book, somewhat of a classic in the trauma field, helped me understand trauma, the body and mind's natural response to traumatic events, and how we can "freeze" and become stuck in trauma. This was useful to me from the point of providing better self knowledge. The book also has exercises on how to heal trauma, but at that time, I did not use them, I mainly benefited from this book by increasing my knowledge, so I can't say if the exercises are helpful. (This is not a workbook.) However, I recommend this book. It gave me greater insight. Here is the review of the Amazon site:

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question: why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals virtually immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed.

Waking the Tiger normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us focus on bodily sensations. Through heightened awareness of these sensations trauma can be healed.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

Now that I am a year and a half into therapy, I think it would be interesting to go back and reread this book.

[sunrise]

My therapist and I have used EMDR to help heal my trauma. It has been very helpful to me. If you are considering EMDR, this is my favorite book on it: Emotional Healing at Warp Speed: the Power of EMDR by David Grand. I found this book very accessible to the layman with lots of examples of trauma that were healed by EMDR.

[pachyderm]

> I recommend this book. It gave me greater insight. Here is the review of the Amazon site:

I have found it very helpful to read the reader reviews on Amazon too. For a good book most of the reviews are very laudatory, but it helps me to read the ones that are not, too.

[Junerain]

I would recommend Mind Over Mood, it helps with everyday situations a great deal, and that is what you said you were looking for....it examines where your thoughts get distorted and gives healthier ways of looking at things...

....http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Over-Mood...6368822&sr=8-1

[sunrise]

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
pachyderm said:
> I recommend this book. It gave me greater insight. Here is the review of the Amazon site:

I have found it very helpful to read the reader reviews on Amazon too. For a good book most of the reviews are very laudatory, but it helps me to read the ones that are not, too.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">I hope the review of this reader (above) was helpful. There was one part of the book, I remember now, that I did find kind of hokey (discussion of an energy "vortex" that was highly speculative and did not seem to relate to the insights on trauma from the animal world that I had found to be useful). So it's not the perfect book, but does have a lot of food for thought.

[jurplesman]

Please read:

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Hypoglycemia