Recommended Reading List

• Healing & Trauma

Emotional Self-Care for Black Women: Discover How to Raise Your Self-Esteem, Eliminate Negative Thinking and Heal from Past Traumas Even if Your Life is Chaotic Right Now

By: Alicia Magoro

Have you been feeling like you can never get a break? Are your days full of conflict and challenges that you constantly have to fight and overcome? Are you tired of riding the rollercoaster of anger, fear, frustration, and overwhelm and wish you could just take a step back from your problems? Being a black woman today comes with unique struggles that others don’t even know about. You face the discrimination that both women and people of color encounter. Your needs are often belittled or dismissed. You have to battle against a lot of unhelpful labels and limitations imposed on you by society.

• Healing & Trauma

The Pain We Carry: Healing from Complex PTSD for People of Color

By: Natalie Y. Gutiérrez LMFT

If you are a person of color who has experienced repeated trauma—such as discrimination, race-related verbal assault, racial stigmatization, poverty, sexual trauma, or interpersonal violence—you may struggle with intense feelings of anger, mistrust, or shame. You may feel unsafe or uncomfortable in your own body, or struggle with building and keeping close relationships. Sometimes you may feel very alone in your pain. But you are not alone.

• Healing & Trauma

The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health: Navigate an Unequal System, Learn Tools for Emotional Wellness, and Get the Help you Deserve

By: Rheeda Walker

It’s time to reclaim your mental health. We can’t deny it any there is a Black mental health crisis in our world today. In addition, the effects of under-education, poverty, and systemic racism have greatly impacted African Americans’ access to effective mental health treatment. It’s time to take Black mental health seriously. It’s time to heal our psychological distress, find community, and combat marginalization in order to thrive.

• Healing & Trauma

After the Rain: Gentle Reminders for Healing, Courage, and Self-Love

By: Alexandra Elle

Part memoir and part guide, Elle shares stirring stories from her own remarkable journey from self-doubt to self-love. This soulful collection is filled with illuminating reflections on loss, fear, bravery, healing, love, acceptance, and more. Readers follow along her journey as she transforms challenging experiences—a difficult childhood, painful romantic relationships, and single parenting as a young mom—into fuel for her career as a successful entrepreneur and author driven by purpose and passion.

• Healing & Trauma

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

By: Melody Beattie

Melody Beattie’s compassionate and insightful look into codependency—the concept of losing oneself in the name of helping another— 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.

• Healing & Trauma

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

By: Bessel van der Kolk M.D.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.

• Healing & Trauma

Decolonizing the Body: Healing, Body-Centered Practices for Women of Color to Reclaim Confidence, Dignity, and Self-Worth

By: Kelsey Blackwell

As a woman of color, you are more likely to experience oppression, discrimination, and physical or sexual violence in your lifetime. In addition, your family may have experienced generational trauma and systemic racism going back for centuries. This old and new trauma can manifest in both the mind and body. However, there are ways you can free yourself from this trauma, build confidence in yourself and your abilities, and restore your powerful sense of self.

• Healing & Trauma

My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

By: Resmaa Menakem

In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. My Grandmother’s Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.

• Healing & Trauma

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

By: Richard Schwartz Ph.D., Alanis Morissette

Is there just one “you”? We’ve been taught to believe we have a single identity, and to feel fear or shame when we can’t control the inner voices that don’t match the ideal of who we think we should be. Yet Dr. Richard Schwartz’s research now challenges this “mono-mind” theory. “All of us are born with many sub-minds―or parts,” says Dr. Schwartz. “These parts are not imaginary or symbolic. They are individuals who exist as an internal family within us―and the key to health and happiness is to honor, understand, and love every part.”