Recommended Reading

Welcome to the group! I'm posting books that I highly recommend to anyone working on their mental health and self-healing.

Please let me know if there are other books you would like me to add to this list!

By Tom Holmes, Ph.D. 📘 Read the free PDF here

A Compassionate and Accessible Introduction to Internal Family Systems (IFS)

If you’ve ever felt like different versions of you are pulling in opposite directions—one part craving rest while another insists on pushing through—Parts Work beautifully explains why.

Tom Holmes introduces readers to the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model through warm illustrations and easy-to-understand metaphors that make the complexity of our inner world feel both approachable and deeply human. Instead of seeing ourselves as “broken,” Holmes helps us recognise that every inner voice, protector, or exile has a purpose.

Why It’s Especially Helpful for CPTSD

There is a parent who never stops criticizing, a friend who turns every kindness into a contest, and a partner who pulls away the moment you get close. You keep reaching out, gently, carefully, only to get pricked again.

Learning how to love them without losing yourself in the process. That’s what this book is about. Not fixing them, not hating them, not pretending it doesn’t hurt.

Dr. John Lund’s How to Hug a Porcupine is a book written by someone who’s clearly been in the trenches of human relationships long enough to know how love can wound as much as it heals. He has written a book that keeps you nodding, underlining, sighing, and whispering, “Yes. That’s it." Between its covers lies a map for those of us wandering through relationships that leave us pricked and bleeding, yet somehow still essential to our lives.

1. The Porcupine Principle

The…

My latest book is textbook-like, as it is a guide for psychotherapists and other helpers to learn my multidimensional approach to effectively treating the childhood trauma that is commonly at the roots of Complex PTSD. This book reorganizes and greatly expands the material of my earlier books. It emphasizes the crucial importance of relational psychotherapy in healing the fear and distrust that most survivors have of all other people. It can deeply aid therapists to mend the damage and arrested development that survivors experienced as traumatized children in the “care” of abusive and/or neglectful parents or other caretakers.

Many therapists have gratefully conveyed to me that the map, perspective, and tools herein for healing complex trauma aids their clients to identify, repair and evolve six key dimensions of their damaged and arrested development. These dimensions are the Relational, Behavioral, Cognitive, Emotional, Somatic, and Spiritual layers of their as-yet unmanifested innate…