Three Books for Healing Trauma and Chronic Illness in 2025

Hello and a gentle welcome to this New Year “full of things that have never been” (Rilke). One of my activities over the holidays was to read and I have 3 books to recommend to you that provide practical tips, exercises and case examples, and variety in their approaches, writing styles and content.

Healing Trauma Through Family Constellations and Somatic Experiencing (SE)

Author Efu Nyaki is a Legacy Faculty teaching Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Master Classes in SE who combines it with an approach for addressing multigenerational trauma known as Family Constellations. Her book describes these two approaches she has found most helpful in her work with a community she co-founded in Brazil called Afya that is a Non Government Organization (NGO) and a Women’s Holistic Healing Center that treats the whole family.

I was captivated by Efu’s Keynote address at the 30th Anniversary SE Conference in November 2024 with her open heart, her way of speaking about ancestors and the manner in which she enabled me to feel a sense of wholeness and connection to the online SE community.

Efu’s book on Healing Trauma is startling in its descriptions of the origins of symptoms and how these approaches have enabled people to heal from symptoms such as:

• addictions
• asthma
• depression
• arrhythmia

Efu’s case example of an adult with asthma was particularly stunning because of her finding of an association with having been separated from their mother before their 3rd birthday. She has found that many with asthma and other symptoms have had similar experiences of early separation, even for something as short as a 3 hour period. Her descriptions give you a sense of the layers of adversity both for the adult with symptoms and for the mother. Efu’s work is powerful evidence consistent with the asthma research by Tony Madrid, who enables children to recover from asthma by helping their mothers heal from trauma that happened during pregnancy, labor and birth or in the first years.

Efu’s book contains a series of straightforward and surprisingly powerful exercises that you can explore on your own for addressing and working with ancestral trauma, multigenerational trauma and other trauma in your lineage.

This book is written in a way that pendulates and titrates (SE terms for a gentle process of working with trauma that minimizes the chances of overwhelm) so the information is easy to digest.

Efu grew up in Tanzania, became a teacher and then a Maryknoll Sister Missionary. Family Constellations was developed by Bert Hellinger, whose work was deeply influenced by his 16 years with the Zulu people in Africa. Here is a link to her book.

The Modern Trauma Toolkit

Author Christy Gibson, MD is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Psychiatry in Alberta, Canada with a Master’s degree in medical education and two TEDx talks under her belt. She’s created a residency training to help student doctors learn to work with populations who have faced oppression. She has also posted regularly and found community on Tik Tok, where one of her videos on “iffirmations” went viral.

Christy’s book provides a simplified, easy-to-read, indepth overview of trauma, the nervous system and polyvagal ways of making sense of symptoms such as fight, flight and freeze / brain fuzz, fatigue, anxiety and much more. She speaks from deep experience as a medical doctor.

I recommend her book in large part for the broad variety of tools she offers in the second half of her book. These tools help people with busy lives begin to heal. Many of these are things you can do yourself, at home, for free that you can incorporate into your daily life. These tools include the Havening technique (an example is that of running your hands down your arms from shoulder to elbow…which is something I recently found myself doing at a moment of stress without realizing it had a “name” and was a technique that is taught, see p. 189); tapping, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), TRE (trauma release exercises) and much more that I had not heard of. There are also exercises scattered throughout. Here is a link to her book.

Unburdened Eating and Internal Family Systems (IFS)

Author Jeanne Catanzaro, PhD is Vice-chair of the IFS Institute (Internal Family Systems – IFS), a psychologist, and an IFS Consultant who has specialized in working with people around disordered eating for the past 25 years.

If you’ve ever wondered what IFS looks like Jeanne’s book provides 5 detailed case examples with dialogue that gives you a sense of how this approach works in healing trauma. Her focus is specifically around parts of ourselves that influence eating, disordered eating and how we feel about our bodies. It also provides a way of seeing the links to prior trauma with greater clarity that can be helpful with other symptoms as well as with chronic illness. Unburdened Eating gives you a sense of the steps in the process, and links to the past, including from having been blamed, shamed, judged and, in so many other ways, “not seen.” It includes a look at the role of cultural burdens, systemic oppression and racism among other external factors that are traumatic and influence our many parts as well as our symptoms.

Along the way, you get a sense of how to access your core Self. Catanzaro explains, in a voice that is steadfastly encouraging throughout, our Self is the aspect of ourselves that “cannot be damaged by trauma. Like the sun, it is always there … and is not diminished by clouds.”

Jeanne and her writing are deeply compassionate and hugely informative on what is often a difficult yet important topic on our healing journeys – how to work with parts of ourselves that feel excruciatingly toxic but that in actuality are working hard with our best intentions in mind. Here is a link to her book.

Related Info and Posts

• Instagram: My adventure with Instagram is up and running and I have a slew of images to share. My instagram page is here.

• Other Books I Recommend: You’ll find a detailed blog post with a list of books I recommend for healing trauma in chronic illness, including for work with attachment / developmental trauma; more on family constellations, chronic illness and multigenerational trauma; memoirs and beyond.

Upcoming Events

Wednesday April 9th, 2025 10-12pm PDT; Pre & Perinatal Panel

I will be part of a 2+ hour panel on the history and role of pre and perinatal experiences hosted by Kate White and the US Body Psychotherapy Association (USABP). It’s called “State of the Art of Perinatal and Prenatal Somatics.” My focus will be on the role of adverse babyhood experiences in chronic illness and the 4 others on the panel will speak to their specialty areas, including

• Craniosacral therapist and cofounder Anna Chitty of the Colorado School of Energies Studies
• Frank Carbone, Womb Continuum, who facilitates womb surround workshops
• Mary Jackson, a midwife, trainer, speaker and facilitator of small group womb process workshops through the Castellino Corporation.

You can register online here. The cost is $25 and you can get a $10 discount using this code: usabpmemberguest