r/CPTSD · 2023

Most-mentioned books in r/CPTSD during 2023

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/CPTSD within the published source unit for 2023. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

Books ranked

593

Tracked mentions in 2023

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

Pete Walker

Pete Walker names a fourth trauma response beyond fight, flight, and freeze: fawn, the instinct to appease the person who's hurting you.

156 in 2023

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk

Bessel van der Kolk spent his career arguing trauma changes the nervous system, and r/CPTSD made the book its shared vocabulary for what happened to them.

72 in 2023

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Gabor Maté

A physician argues that trauma is the hidden engine of most chronic illness, and that Western society is the primary carrier.

43 in 2023

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Lindsay C. Gibson

A psychologist sorts adults raised by emotionally immature parents into internalizers who blame themselves and externalizers who blame everyone else.

41 in 2023

Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

Lundy Bancroft

A domestic-violence counselor spent years running batterer-intervention groups, then wrote down the excuses so readers could recognize them faster.

33 in 2023

What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

Stephanie Foo

A radio producer gets diagnosed with complex PTSD at thirty and spends the rest of the book finding out what actually treats it.

32 in 2023

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

Richard C. Schwartz

A therapist explains why the voice in your head that hates you is just another part trying, badly, to protect you.

31 in 2023

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

Marshall B. Rosenberg

Marshall Rosenberg's script for expressing needs without blame, surfaced 144 times across trauma and therapy subreddits over seven years.

25 in 2023

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

Sue Johnson

A couples therapist maps every recurring fight back to one question neither partner is asking out loud: are you there for me?

23 in 2023

#10

Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect

Jonice Webb

A therapist names what your parents never did: the neglect you can't quite prove, because nothing happened.

15 in 2023

#11

Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors

Janina Fisher

A trauma therapist argues the parts of you that feel broken are actually surviving, and gives you a framework to stop fighting them.

14 in 2023

#12

Mindset

Carol S. Dweck

A Stanford psychologist argues that believing your abilities can grow is itself the ability that determines whether they do.

14 in 2023

#13

The Drama of the Gifted Child

Alice Miller

Alice Miller's 1979 argument that childhood emotional neglect creates a false self — and that reclaiming your real one requires grieving, not gratitude.

12 in 2023

#14

Self-Therapy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Wholeness Using IFS

Jay Earley

Jay Earley writes a step-by-step manual for talking to your own internal parts, and r/internalfamilysystems says it beats anything IFS's own founder ever published.

11 in 2023

#15

What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

Bruce D. Perry

Oprah and Bruce Perry reframe mental illness as injury: not 'what's wrong with you' but what was done to you, and whether the brain can be rewired.

10 in 2023

#16

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl

A psychiatrist survives three concentration camps and concludes the ones who lived weren't the strongest, they were the ones who still had a reason to.

8 in 2023

#17

Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation

Suzette Boon

A skills workbook for patients and clinicians treating trauma-related dissociation, built around structured exercises and psychoeducation about dissociative parts.

7 in 2023

#18

Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

Peter A. Levine

A trauma therapist's account of the body finishing what fight-or-flight started, built around 'felt sense' exercises and a three-part brain model.

6 in 2023

#19

Healing the Shame That Binds You

John Bradshaw

John Bradshaw's 1988 guide distinguishes toxic shame from healthy shame and argues the internalized kind is the engine behind addiction, abuse cycles, and most self-destruction.

5 in 2023

#20

Healing Developmental Trauma

Laurence Heller

Laurence Heller's NARM framework reframes developmental trauma as a problem of nervous-system adaptation, not character failure.

4 in 2023

#21

Atlas of the Heart

Brené Brown

Brené Brown catalogs 87 human emotions with research definitions so readers can name what they actually feel instead of guessing.

3 in 2023

#22

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment

Amir Levine

A psychiatrist and a researcher apply neuroscience to dating: figure out your attachment style, then stop being surprised by your relationship patterns.

3 in 2023

#23

Emotional Blackmail: When the People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to Manipulate You

Susan Forward

A psychologist names the Fear, Obligation, and Guilt tactics abusers use to keep you compliant — and tells you how to stop responding.

3 in 2023

#24

Daring Greatly

Brené Brown

Shame research written for a general audience, adopted by a trauma-recovery subreddit as something closer to a manual.

2 in 2023

#25

Feeling Good

David D. Burns

David Burns hands depressed readers a list of ten named thinking errors and a worksheet to catch themselves making one.

2 in 2023