Have you struggled to have the happy, emotionally nourishing relationships that you deserve? If you are a survivor of childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse, you've spent your life feeling as if happiness in love and friendship is for other people, not you.

To have connections with others, you've paid a price of admission to relationships, sacrificing your values, your safety, your sense of personal worth, and sometimes your financial security. You've felt unworthy of love. You believed, because of how you were treated when you were a child, that you had to pay these prices simply to have people be around you. You've been used and exploited by people who said they loved and cared about you.

You've read every relationship self-help book on the market, but none of them seem to understand the ways in which your childhood trauma has affected your ability to be close to others.

If this is your life, this book is for you. Drawing upon the author's four decades of working with survivors of childhood trauma, abuse, and neglect, this book teaches you to understand the emotional and neurobiological causes of your difficult relationship patterns. It describes effective strategies for learning how to trust yourself, assess other people more accurately, and take care of yourself emotionally so that you can have the healthy relationships that you deserve.

The groundbreaking work on trauma that remains a “classic for our generation” (Bessel van der Kolk, MD, author of The Body Keeps the Score).

Trauma and Recovery is the foundational text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a political frame, psychiatrist Judith L. Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context.

Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.

This edition includes a new epilogue by the author assessing what has—and hasn’t—changed in understanding and treating trauma over the last three decades.

Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we heal.

If you grew up with an emotionally immature, unavailable, or selfish parent, you may have lingering feelings of anger, loneliness, betrayal, or abandonment. You may recall your childhood as a time when your emotional needs were not met, when your feelings were dismissed, or when you took on adult levels of responsibility in an effort to compensate for your parent’s behavior. These wounds can be healed, and you can move forward in your life.

In this breakthrough book, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable. You will see how these parents create a sense of neglect, and discover ways to heal from the pain and confusion caused by your childhood. By freeing yourself from your parents’ emotional immaturity, you can recover your true nature, control how you react to them, and avoid disappointment. Finally, you’ll learn how to create positive, new relationships so you can build a better life.

Discover the four types of difficult parents:

The emotional parent instills feelings of instability and anxiety
The driven parent stays busy trying to perfect everything and everyone
The passive parent avoids dealing with anything upsetting
The rejecting parent is withdrawn, dismissive, and derogatory