Trauma Memoir

Having suffered the unimaginable loss of her first husband and child, Lindsay Nicholson worked her way up to become the most successful lifestyle magazine editor in Britain. But when a would-be suicide ran in front of her car, the pages of her picture-perfect life fell apart once more. In just one year, Lindsay lost her marriage, job and home, and was even arrested. Suicidal and suffering from profound PTSD, she tried medication, therapy and New Age courses – until she found the answers she was looking for in the pages of her former magazine.

I was four months old when I was adopted, taken from an orphanage and placed into what was supposed to be a loving family. But love had conditions. Survival had rules. And silence was the price of staying. By sixteen, I had already learned how to disappear—into alcohol, into drugs, into the arms of men who didn’t care if I made it out alive. By eighteen, I was a mother, barely keeping my head above water, raising a child while still a child myself. When I got pregnant again at twenty-one, I knew one thing for sure: I wasn’t going to drag another innocent life into my chaos.

With poignant prose and a deeply authentic personal story, this harrowing account exposes the stark and painful realities of childhood abuse, painting a heart-breaking picture of the lasting pain and fear that it inflicts on its victims. Spanning 30 years, in this coming-of-age memoir, author Christina Vitagliano recounts in vivid detail the frightening nights spent when her father loomed in the doorway of her bedroom, along with the psychological toll that the relentless familial abuse took on her psyche.

When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change. A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be "managed", and Rachel had, at best, two years to live. Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive.

A Life in Trauma is a frank, remarkable account of a career spent helping others, offering a positive outlook on the potential of Ireland’s healthcare system in the future. Concern. Compassion. Doubt. Despair. Anger. Hope. Imagine juggling these feelings every day in a situation where your work could mean the difference between someone's life or death.

Sandra Pankhurst founded her trauma cleaning business to help people whose emotional scars are written on their houses. From the forgotten flat of a drug addict to the infested home of a hoarder, Sandra enters properties and lives at the same time. But few of the people she looks after know anything of the complexity of Sandra's own life. Raised in an uncaring home, Sandra's miraculous gift for warmth and humour in the face of unspeakable personal tragedy mark her out as a one-off and make this biography unmissable.

This is a collection of poems inspired by love, loss of love, and other tragic and traumatic events that began in late July of 2000—so some poems are about love and others about the loss of that love. This is my autobiography in poetry form.

A book for psychotherapists and their clients — and for anyone who wants to make the journey from shame to unshame. Carolyn Spring, author of ‘Recovery is my best revenge: my experience of trauma, abuse and dissociative identity disorder’, documents in this, her second book, her journey through psychotherapy to heal and resolve trauma-based shame, which had resulted in a catastrophic mental breakdown in her early thirties and an eventual diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID).

This audiobook chronicles the triumphs and failures of his surgical life. Having spent his childhood in the backstreets of a northern steel town, he went on to become one of the world's foremost heart surgeons. His drive for perfection in his profession took him to the world-renowned Harefield Hospital, the foremost heart surgery centre in Birmingham, Alabama and the newly-created Cardiothoracic Centre in Oxford. Then in 2019 in Wuhan he was the first Western doctor to learn about Covid-19 before the virus was identified.

Paul Scheer has entertained countless fans and podcast listeners with stories about the odd, wild, and absurd details of his life. Yet these tales have pointed to deeper, more difficult truths that the actor and comedian has kept to himself. Now, he is finally ready to share those truths for the first time—but, of course, with a healthy dose of humor.

Late one night, while Rebecca Fogg was alone in her apartment, her hand was partially amputated in an explosion. Quick thinking saved her life, but the journey to recovery would be a slow one. As the doctors rebuilt her hand, Rebecca (who also survived 9/11) began rebuilding her sense of self by studying the physical and psychological process of recovery.

In this intimate memoir, renowned developer of Somatic Experiencing, Peter A. Levine—the man who changed the way psychologists, doctors, and healers understand and treat the wounds of trauma and abuse—shares his personal journey to heal his own severe childhood trauma and offers profound insights into the evolution of his innovative healing method.

More Confessions shares the raw and honest feelings of emergency service professionals through true "story behind the story" revelations. Disclosing experiences from both sides of the gurney, Sherry and other EMS, ER, paramilitary, and firefighter responders walk you along their fragile line of sanity. Using humor as a life raft during perfect storms, workers reflect upon how they endure and survive personal and professional tragedy while trying not to care too much, and what happens when they fail in that attempt.

HMP Graymoor. One of the UK’s most notorious prisons. Home to nearly 800 murderers, rapists and child molesters. Reporting for her first shift inside is Rebecca: twenty-two, newly graduated—and about to sit down with some of the country’s most dangerous criminals. In this gripping, hard-hitting memoir, forensic psychologist Dr Rebecca Myers revisits her time in the ‘Hot Seat’ with Graymoor’s infamous inmates—who might not be as different to us as we think.

Rose Cartwright reveals how the failure of the mental health system to cure her OCD led her to radical action. While she explored her trauma through a series of mind-bending psychedelic trips, Rose started to interrogate our dominant medical paradigm. What if people’s intense distress is not a symptom of illness, but a desperate expression of our need for love and connection? Rose set out on a quest to draw a new map of mental health, interviewing experts in psychiatry and neuroscience along the way: what she discovered will have implications for generations to come.

In November 2020, Caroline Darian received a call from the police in Carpentras. Her father was in police custody. The seizure of his computer equipment revealed the unthinkable: since 2013, he had drugged his wife before handing her over, in a state of unconsciousness, to men, from all ages and stages of life. With exceptional courage, Darian recounts the earth-shattering discovery that a loved one, her own father, is capable of the worst.

For writer and human rights advocate Amanda Jetté Knox, the inspiring story of her family’s journey of love and acceptance, when both her child and partner came out as transgender one after the other, was the hopeful beginning to their new lives. Their tale, shared in her memoir Love Lives Here and embraced by readers everywhere, quickly found its way to the top of bestseller lists.

Nick Smith charts his journey from trainee teacher through to inspiring head across his near thirty-year career, with fascinating insights into the educational system along the way. The catalogue of incidents ranges from the embarrassing to the ridiculous, hilarious to the heart-breaking, and together they illustrate the daily grind of life at the whiteboard face in UK schools. Head Trauma is more than an amusing look at the trials of teacherdom—it's a call to arms for parents, teachers and pupils alike.

David W. Powell enlisted for a tour of duty in April 1966 with the US Marines after receiving an imminent draft notice. Believing he would be able to leverage his existing skills as a computer programmer, he never thought all they would see on his resume was his Karate expertise. Even less that he would wind up serving as a Rocket man in the jungles of Da Nang and Chu Lai for a 13 month tour in hell. David's journey from naive civilian to battle-hardened combat veteran shows us all how fragile our humanity really is.

This Ragged Grace tells the story of Octavia's journey through recovery from alcohol addiction, and the parallel story of her father's descent into Alzheimer's. Looking back over this time, each of the seven chapters explores the feelings and experiences of the corresponding year of recovery, tracing the shift in emotion and understanding that comes with the deepening connection to this new way of life. Over the course of this seven-year period, life continues to unfold. Paths are abandoned, people fall ill, waters get choppy, seemingly impossible things are navigated without the old fixes.