Resources

Resources Vault

Hello and welcome to my Resources Vault!

My Resources Vault is a hand-selected and highly curated list of book recommendations, free worksheets and personality quizzes and assessments that I personally recommend to help guide your wellness journey.

Over the years, I’ve read countless books and come across a tremendous number of resources, all of which are intended to help support and guide a journey of wellness.

Of course, there are so many options available today that it can actually feel quite overwhelming to know where to begin!

I hope that these will help you better understand your own personality, any symptoms of stress, and the unique skills and strengths that you possess!

Happy exploring,

Trudi Howley

Licensed Professional Counselor
Somatic Psychotherapist
Certified Professional Coach
Trauma Healing Specialist

 

Recommended Books

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

This former #1 New York Times Bestseller analyzes the effects of trauma and post-traumatic stress on the body—and upon the whole of society—through a wide range of stories, scientific studies, and evidence that suggests more people than we typically realize are still affected by traumatic episodes and events, long after their conclusion.

When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection

When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection

Articulating the connection between stress and disease, this international best-seller offers studies, stories, and insights into how disease is suspected or understood to be the body’s way of saying “no” to what the mind cannot or will not acknowledge as true.

Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past

Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past

The creator of Somatic Experiencing presents a guide for better understanding a highly complex and even controversial topic of post-traumatic stress and traumatic memory, including the idea that the body itself stores “implicit” memory. You’ll learn how symptoms of trauma manifest even long after traumatic experiences have passed, and ways to constructively work with healing traumatic memories.

Moving Beyond Trauma: The Roadmap to Healing from Your Past and Living with Ease and Vitality

Moving Beyond Trauma: The Roadmap to Healing from Your Past and Living with Ease and Vitality

This book presents a thorough introduction to Somatic Experiencing®, a body-based mode of therapeutic healing that focuses on alleviating symptoms of trauma as they manifest in the nervous system.

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life.

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life.

Originally published in 1994, this book eventually went on to become an international best-seller as mindfulness, meditation, and reflective contemplation gained popular acceptance throughout society. A collection of short meditations on mindfulness, this book will help you stay connected to your sense of self in your everyday life.

The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse, 3rd Edition.

The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse, 3rd Edition.

For more than two decades, this compassionate and sensitive book has been a looked-to resource for helping survivors of sexual abuse heal from the traumatic events of the past, improve the quality of their intrapersonal relationships, and rediscover sexual intimacy for themselves. This is a comprehensive and helpful read for survivors and their partners.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

This literary graphic novel is a modern-day fable full of charm, wit, and playful intelligence, featuring over 100 illustrations that beautifully convey the life lessons strewn throughout its pages. A delightful treasure of inspirational quotes for all ages.

Moving Beyond Trauma: The Roadmap to Healing from Your Past and Living with Ease and Vitality

Moving Beyond Trauma: The Roadmap to Healing from Your Past and Living with Ease and Vitality

This book offers a practical mechanism that helps its readers learn how to let go of inner blockages that hold them back from the happiness, love, joy, success, health they desire and deserve in their lives. What we stand to gain when we let go is, ultimately, Enlightenment! An easy to read and powerful book.

Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender

Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender

This book offers a practical mechanism that helps its readers learn how to let go of inner blockages that hold them back from the happiness, love, joy, success, health they desire and deserve in their lives. What we stand to gain when we let go is, ultimately, Enlightenment! An easy to read and powerful book.

Grief is a Mess.

Grief is a Mess.

Illustrating the unpredictable and messy nature of life after the experience of personal loss, this book blends laughter, comfort, and compassion for the journey of grief. Relevant to children and adults alike, cartoon characterizations narrate the need for patience, kindness, compassion, and understanding along the way. Grief is normalized in a relatable way.

Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain

Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain

Based on cutting-edge research in the field of interpersonal neurobiology, this book offers parents of teenagers and teenagers alike a resource for transforming some of the most notoriously challenging years of brain development into some of the most rewarding. An informative book for any bewildered parent of a teenager.

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind

This book leans on new science and offers age-appropriate advice for a revolutionary approach to child-rearing, including twelve key strategies to help parents foster healthy brain development in their children—and a calmer, happier experience in those children’s everyday lives.

 

Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankel’s stirring memoir recreates his experiences inside Nazi concentration camps to illustrate his belief that suffering cannot be avoided in life, but every human still retains the ability to choose how to cope with that suffering, and even to find meaning in it.

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

Leaning on attachment theory, this book presents seven healing conversations that can be embraced by romantic couples to bond, explore one another, and nurture their relationship with the goal of a lifetime of love.

Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

This treatise on the complexity and profundity of the female experience looks upon cultural myths, archetypes, and stories to recreate a modern-day understanding for the endangered “Wild Woman,” the instinctual and untamed nature of all women.

Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

Modern-day neuroscience meets ancient spiritual principles and mindfulness practices to affirm how what was once long suspected can now be proven: that our everyday thoughts actually re-shape and re-sculpt the human brain.

It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

Affirming that there is nothing wrong with grief—and that every grieving journey is unique to the individual, despite what culture and social expectations claim—this book challenges “grief myths” and offers practical exercises and suggestions for common struggles with grief, including managing your stress, improving your sleep, and alleviating your anxiety without trying to “fix” or “remove” the pain of grief.

I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

Examining the specific impact of mental health dysregulation, including anxiety, stress, and depression, on the male gender, this book contends that men are experiencing an epidemic of depression but refuse to acknowledge it or accept treatment because of toxic definitions of masculinity in Western culture.

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

The strange and confusing experience of codependency must be understood if you wish to remove its hold on your life. This book offers life stories, interesting personal reflections, actionable exercises, and even some personality tests to help readers chart a path from codependency toward freedom.

Turtles All the Way Down

Turtles All the Way Down

This instant best-selling novel is a story of love and lifelong friendship told with an emotionally-stirring tone and flow for which its author is globally renowned.

The Power of the Herd: A Nonpredatory Approach to Social Intelligence, Leadership, and Innovation

The Power of the Herd: A Nonpredatory Approach to Social Intelligence, Leadership, and Innovation

Discover “nonpredatory power” in how you develop a sense of personal and professional assertiveness, cultivate your own creativity, deal with conflicts in the relationship and in the workplace, and heighten your overarching mind-body awareness.

Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship

Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship

A book designed for children of mothers with borderline personality disorder, this book offers guidelines, stories, and suggestions for creating healthier relationships between children and their mothers—without falling victim to common misunderstandings and well-established pitfalls in these sorts of relationships.

Why Isn't My Brain Working?: A Revolutionary Understanding of Brain Decline and Effective Strategies to Recover Your Brain's Health

Why Isn't My Brain Working?: A Revolutionary Understanding of Brain Decline and Effective Strategies to Recover Your Brain's Health

Losing your memory? Can’t focus or concentrate? Do you have brain fog or tire easily? Have you lost your zest for life or motivation? Do people tell you this is all a normal part of aging? If so, your brain may be growing old too fast, or degenerating. Modern diets, a stressful lifestyle, and environmental toxins all take their toll on the brain. This doesn’t just happen to seniors-brain disorders and degeneration are on the rise for young and old alike. The good news is the brain is extremely adaptable and wants to get well.

Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others

Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others

A longtime trauma worker, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky offers a deep and empathetic survey of the often-unrecognized toll taken on those working to make the world a better place. We may feel tired, cynical, or numb or like we can never do enough. These, and other symptoms, affect us individually and collectively, sapping the energy and effectiveness we so desperately need if we are to benefit humankind, other living things, and the planet itself. 

Articles

Being Stalked and Somatic Regulation for Victims by Trudi Howley, March 22, 2020.

In this guest post for AgeWellLifestyle.com, I share advice for someone who has experienced being stalked and harassed, including how the effects of the trauma span beyond the actual experience itself. Learn how incomplete self-protective responses to actual or perceived threats linger symptomatically in the body over time, plus, how you can start to treat those symptoms.

Worksheets

Learn Somatic Regulation: A handout designed for frontline healthcare workers who are under heightened stress, anxiety, and traumatic experiences while dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, this PDF worksheet offers basic skills for somatic regulation.

Transformational Somatics: Somatic and Narrative Worksheet. This fillable worksheet helps you to use somatics and narrative to regulate any distress or the experience of a trauma trigger.

Somatic Symptoms Assessment: Assess your somatic symptoms and their manifestation in physical symptoms like pain, trouble sleeping, and common digestive issues.

Recommended Videos

In this 4-minute video, discover the ways that your body is talking to you all the time through various means of nonverbal communication; a cornerstone concept of Somatic Experiencing®.

Why do people succeed? Is it because they’re smart? Or are they just lucky? Neither. Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success.

Bryant Gumbel sits down with Lewis Hamilton to talk about his life on top of Formula 1 racing, as well as his relationship with his younger brother Nicolas Hamilton.

Dive into the deep with open water swimmer Bhakti Sharma, as she shares what she learned about resilience during her personal journey from the scorching heat of Rajasthan, India to the bone-chilling waters of her record-breaking swim in Antarctica and her courageous crossing of the English Channel.

In a culture where being social and outgoing are prized above all else, it can be difficult, even shameful, to be an introvert. But, as Susan Cain argues in this passionate talk, introverts bring extraordinary talents and abilities to the world, and should be encouraged and celebrated.

Legendary duo Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin have been friends for decades. In a raw, tender and wide-ranging conversation hosted by Pat Mitchell, the three discuss longevity, feminism, the differences between male and female friendship, what it means to live well.

Personality Quizzes

Multiple Intelligences Assessment: A resource first developed by Dr. Terry Armstrong, this online assessment tool will help you discover your instinctive preferences for learning, or, what are called the “multiple intelligences.”

Big Five Personality Traits: This scientific personality assessment takes only 10 minutes and demonstrates how you score for the so-called “Big Five” personality traits, which are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Braverman Personality Type Assessment: The Braverman assessment offers a subjective analysis of your brain’s neurotransmitters and suggests that your test results can reveal a momentary snapshot of your dominant and deficient brain chemicals. See the disclaimer below.

Jung Typology Test™: This personality test is a hybrid of two popular personality assessments based on Carl Jung’s personality type theory and Isabel Briggs Myers’ personality type theory, and indicates core personality traits, personal preferences, and potential career and professional pathways.

Websites

Neuroanatomist and author of My Stroke of Insight, Dr. Jill Bolt Taylor documented her own stroke as it was happening and her recovery from it. Her website is: http://www.drjilltaylor.com

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Every practitioner of personal wellness could use a little support and guidance throughout one’s journey. As an experienced Somatic Psychotherapist and Certified Professional Coach, I’ve done the hard work for you and curated a special list of some of my favorite resources, which I have found supportive and important throughout many of my clients’ wellness journeys.

I kindly offer these resources to you trusting that they may help guide, inform, and empower your own!

My Resources Vault contains nearly two dozen book recommendations, a slate of free worksheets that I have created for you, and even personality quizzes and assessments to help you better understand your own personality, symptoms of stress, and unique skills and strengths.