The Trauma You Carry: An Honest Guide to PTSD, Complex Trauma, and What Actually Helps (The Psychology of Wellbeing Series Book 7)
About
If you are living with the long effects of PTSD, complex trauma, or a difficult childhood — and especially if you are autistic or have ADHD — you may have noticed that most trauma books were not written with you in mind.
Some things happen once, and then refuse to stay in the past.
The hypervigilance that never quite switches off. The difficulty trusting people who have given you no reason not to. The way an ordinary afternoon can tip, without much warning, into a far older feeling. The relationships that keep arranging themselves into shapes you half recognise.
You may not even be sure that what happened to you counts.
Dr. Melanie du Preez has spent more than twenty-six years in a consulting room with people who were handed the tidy version of recovery — feel the feeling, release it, emerge lighter and wiser by the final chapter — and found that their own experience declined to cooperate.
This is not that book.
AN HONEST MAP, NOT A PROMISE
The Trauma You Carry explains what trauma actually is, and, just as carefully, what it is not. It holds a clear line between the ordinary hard things that happen to almost everyone and the specific, lasting injury clinicians mean by the word. It explains why “that was years ago” never helps. Why your reaction is not an overreaction, but an old and appropriate one arriving at the wrong address. And why the story you told yourself about being the problem was written by a child, working with the only information available.
It is also unusually honest about the evidence. Where a popular idea is more popular than it is supported — the vault of memories supposedly locked in the tissues, the confident neuroscience, the theory sold as settled fact — this book says so.
INSIDE:
- Why the past arrives as happening rather than remembering
- Hypervigilance, dissociation, and the four survival responses — including the two nobody notices
- What the body genuinely holds, and what it does not
- How trauma reshapes trust, and what actually repairs it
- Shame, self-blame, and why affirmations never touch them
- A candid appraisal of EMDR, somatic work, medication and therapy
- What you can do while you wait for treatment
- When a book is not enough, and how to find real help
WRITTEN WITH NEURODIVERGENT READERS AS A PRIMARY AUDIENCE, NOT A FOOTNOTE
Autistic and ADHD adults are more likely to have been harmed, more likely to have been harmed in ways the diagnostic manuals do not recognise, and routinely misread — including by themselves. A full chapter is given to this, and every chapter returns to it.
No motivational-poster language. No suggestion that your suffering was secretly good for you. No instruction to forgive anybody.
The seventh and final book in The Psychology of Wellbeing series.
Includes South African crisis resources. This book is a companion to trauma-informed treatment, not a substitute for it.