The Trauma You Carry: The Field Guide: What to Say and Do in the Hard Moments: A Practical Companion (The Psychology of Wellbeing Field Guides Series Book 7)
About
When it is actually happening, you do not need theory. You need to know what to do next.
The meeting where your voice goes. The message from a relative you were not ready for. The 3 a.m. when the shame gets loud. The touch you wanted and flinched from anyway. These are the ten-minute stretches that trauma is really made of, and they arrive with no warning and no script.
This is the book for those moments.
The Trauma You Carry: The Field Guide is a practical, scenario-based companion to Dr. Melanie du Preez’s The Trauma You Carry. No theory. No exercises. No journalling. Just 48 real situations and, for each one, what makes it hard and three things you might actually do — with a line to say when it goes sideways.
FIND THE THING THAT IS HAPPENING. TURN TO IT. CLOSE THE BOOK.
You do not read this cover to cover. You keep it within reach and open it when you need it. Inside, forty-eight everyday situations across eight areas:
- When it hits you out of nowhere — triggers, flashbacks, going flat in public
- At work — criticism, disclosure, the manager who shouts
- In your body — shutdown, 3 a.m. waking, symptoms nobody can explain
- Partners and close friends — telling someone, flinching from touch, being loved by someone steady
- Family, and the question of contact — gatherings, forgiveness, low contact, the dying parent
- When the shame talks — compliments, “why didn’t you leave?”, the 2 a.m. self-hatred
- Getting help, and surviving it — the first call, the wrong therapist, waiting lists and no money
- Neurodivergent specifics — masking, being disbelieved, “too sensitive” again
WRITTEN FOR AUTISTIC AND ADHD READERS, NOT AROUND THEM
A full chapter, and countless entries throughout, are written for the neurodivergent reader specifically — the masking, the sensory overload, the accommodations you should not have to explain your whole history to get.
No motivational-poster language. No promise to fix you. This book does one thing: it helps you get through the next ten minutes without making things worse.
Read it alongside The Trauma You Carry, the seventh book in The Psychology of Wellbeing series — or entirely on its own.
Includes South African crisis resources. A companion to trauma-informed treatment, not a substitute for it.