Yes yes yes! Everything you said here resonates.

Endlessly unpacking our traumas with no explanation of hope for healing is often itself retraumatizing. It was good for me to unearth my repressed traumas so I could identify what needed healing and break whatever cycles I needed to stop repeating in my personal life — but I can’t say that any particular book helped me get there, nor did engulfing myself in the trauma of others do me much good. It’s certainly been nice to know that I’m not alone, but I’m somewhat past that phase of self-acceptance.

I have certainly found some books on trauma illuminating in a way that helped me identify what I needed - such as No Bad Parts - but more often than not a lot of the popular literature out there spends way too much time describing horrific examples of trauma so the reader can merely identify that that are, in fact, traumatized. These books seem to use the trauma as a sort of Mary Sue insert for the reader.

I know I’ve experienced trauma, and I know what my trauma was, and I don’t care to read book after book primarily centered in therapists telling their patients stories without any followup on how or if that patient was able to start a healing process.

My own healing experience has involved a lot of self-identification and acknowledgment of where my trauma is held - but the bigger pieces have been stress tolerance, reparenting, compassionate inner dialogue - particularly when strong emotions or triggers do arise, learning to set boundaries, listen to what my body is asking for when I feel unpleasant (or even pleasant) sensations, and taking efforts to take better care of myself and my home.

To some degree, reading endless stories of trauma feels not much different to me than watching car crash videos on YouTube instead if watching a documentary. The Body Keeps the Score is like the potato chip of popular psychology.