10 Books on healing childhood trauma, childhood wounds, and reparenting
One of the most important topics on mental health is how we can reparent ourselves and heal our inner child. I have written about how you can reparent yourself and one question I get often is which are the best books for reparenting yourself.
To help you with this journey of healing from childhood wounds, childhood trauma, bad parenting, and emotionally abusive upbringing, here are some wonderful books to help you reparent your inner child.
1. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay Gibson
One way we can choose not to be victims of our past is through reparenting ourselves from bad parenting. If you grew up with parents that were emotionally immature, unavailable, selfish, and lacking emotional intelligence, this affects the kind of person you are today.
You might constantly feel angry, abandoned, struggle to trust others and form healthy relationships, and even suffer from emotional challenges. You may be working too hard to compensate in areas where your parenting fell short and this can be exhausting. Check out this book and see how you can reparent yourself from a past of immature parents to the best person you can be.
2. Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries and Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy by Lindsay Gibson
This book is a sequel to Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. The topic of reparenting is as wide as it can get. You will realize that there are so many ways that our upbringing can hurt us today as adults. This book offers tools to help you protect yourself from emotional takeover by parents and check to ensure that your emotions and needs are respected. It will help you develop healthy boundaries to sustain you throughout your adulthood.
Other books by the author on the same healing from emotionally immature parents
3. Narcissistic Mothers: How to Handle a Narcissistic Parent and Recover from CPTSD (Adult Children of Narcissists Recovery Book)
We don’t talk about narcissist mothers as often as we should and yet we all have a friend or have been affected by narcissist mothers. Do you struggle with self-confidence, doubting yourself to a point where you doubt your sanity, unhealthy insecurity and jealousy, indecisiveness, obsessive paranoia, and even inability to be comfortable with who you are, and lacking self-acceptance?
If you had/ and still have an abusive mother, narcissist, and emotionally invalidates you, they may affect your life and deny you the joys of having healthy adulthood. This book was written by someone who has been through this experience and has knowledge and education on how to break free from the effects of being brought up by a narcissistic mother.
Other books by the author on healing from narcissistic parents are:
4. Difficult Mothers, Adult Daughters: A Guide For Separation, Liberation & Inspiration (Narcissistic Mother or Borderline Personality Disorder, Mother Daughter Relationship Book)- Karen C L Anderson
Relationships between mothers and daughters are often delicate. Some sway from being as close as sisters to where they can hardly stand each other. If you are an adult daughter that struggles with a narcissist, controlling or difficult mother, there is not much you can do about your behavior.
However, you can do much on your behavior since you have control over how you react to difficult mothers. You can emotionally separate yourself from difficult mothers without guilt and anxiety so that you can create a life that you love using your own values and principles.
This book will help you understand why difficult relationships arise between daughters and mothers, how you can transform and heal from mother wounds and reparent yourself to become the person you desire to be.
5. Masters of Emotional Blackmail: Understanding and Dealing with Verbal Abuse and Emotional Manipulation. How Manipulators Use Guilt, Fear, Obligation, and Other Tactics to Control People
Emotional manipulators use basic human emotions to control you. Everyday emotions are turned into something you shouldn’t be feeling. If you have ever found yourself doing something out of guilt, fear, or obligation or something you didn’t want to do but someone that influences you made you do it, this is the kind of manipulation this book talks about.
If you had parents that were verbally abusive and emotionally manipulative, you need to read this book to understand their thinking and how you can get past that and reparent yourself to the person you want to be.
6. Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child by John Bradshaw
The wounds we receive when growing up can continue to hurt us in our adulthood. Methods used in this book explain how we can reach back to the child inside and heal these wounds. This book has practical questionnaires which can help you work through your childhood pain and come up with ways to reclaim your inner child so that you can develop adulthood that has recovered from the past.
7. Healing The Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families by Charles L. Whitfield
Our childhood traumas are painful to carry through our childhood. They affect the value of the life that we live, affect our relationships and the wounds can continue to hurt throughout our childhood.
In this book, therapist and physician Charles Whitfield helps us differentiate our false self from our true self. He helps us identify the core issues that affect our lives and how we can recover from them. This book is a strong introduction to recognizing and healing from the painful results of childhood trauma.
8. Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child by Thich Nhat Hanh
This is a book on mental health. It helps encourage wellness and balance mental health focusing on mindful awareness of our emotions. When we have had damaged relationships and hurt experienced as children, this book shows how anger, sadness, and fear can be turned into joy and tranquility by learning to accommodate and take charge of our emotions.
9. Recovery of Your Inner Child: The Highly Acclaimed Method for Liberating Your Inner Self by Lucia Capacchione
We all have our inner child within us. The part that is playful, intuitive, and creative is the inner child. Sometimes, adulthood suppresses our inner child especially when the child has been hurt in the past. The inner child is the key to intimacy in relationships, emotional wellbeing, recovery from addictions as well as wisdom and understanding of ourselves.
When our inner child has been hurt it affects the quality of life we live in adulthood. This book will show you how to relate to your inner child and how to embrace this child, however vulnerable it is, and nurture it to bring magic and joy into your adult life.
10. Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers
Buy on AmazonThis is yet another book written for daughters that had difficult relationships with their mothers. When you have a parent that constantly criticizes you develop so much self-doubt and feel that you will never be good enough. You constantly seek the approval of your mother to a point where it is draining your life.
Recommended Course: Self Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself
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