Suggested Books about Domestic Violence and Intimate Partner Violence
"Rose Colored Glasses struck me as both courageous and necessary the way you weave personal experience with professional insight offers survivors not only validation but also a practical path toward healing. It’s rare to find a book that feels at once deeply human and clinically informed, and yours achieves that balance beautifully."
"I absolutely LOVE your book!! I’ve highlighted as I've gone along, so I can go back to reference. And the validation I have felt from you saying WHY those actions were wrong has helped me immensely. Kinda mind blowing on some of them. Thank you for this book!!"
Healing begins with understanding what really happened in your last toxic relationship.
In Rose Colored Glasses, therapist and educator Kate Mageau takes readers inside the emotional landscape of abuse, showing how toxic relationships unfold through the joys, the terrors, and the gaslighting. Part true story, part self-help guide, this book reveals what emotional abuse truly looks like, especially in the early stages when it’s hardest to name.
Through raw storytelling and professional expertise, Mageau helps readers understand the hidden patterns of psychological abuse, why leaving is never simple, and how to reclaim their identity afterward.
Told in three parts and drawn from lived experience, this is more than a memoir. It is a survival tool for anyone seeking emotional abuse recovery and a new path forward. Whether you are a survivor, a friend, or a professional supporting someone through their healing journey, this book offers clarity, compassion, and hope.
You’ll learn how to:
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Recognize the real warning signs beyond oversimplified checklists
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Understand why leaving is complicated, not a failure
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Support yourself or someone you love without blame or shame
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Rebuild your confidence and sense of self after toxic love
Kate Mageau is a licensed mental health counselor and nationally certified counselor specializing in relational trauma and emotional abuse recovery. She also trains other therapists to recognize and treat emotional abuse. With years of experience helping survivors, she knows that transformation rarely comes from lectures or lists. It comes from stories that make us feel seen.
For anyone who has experienced a toxic relationship, Rose Colored Glassesoffers understanding, empowerment, and a way to see your past more clearly and your future more freely.
Companion workbook also available: Healing from Toxic Relationships: The Workbook.
"Your dedication to helping survivors rebuild safety and self-trust, while also training other therapists to recognize and treat emotional abuse, shows how deeply you’ve committed yourself to this mission. That combination of lived empathy and professional expertise gives your writing a resonance that can truly change lives."
Have you ever left a relationship and thought What just happened? Or have you been in a relationship where you were constantly questioning what was happening, who the other person really was, or why you stayed in it longer than you would normally stay in a relationship that didn't make you happy?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may have been in a toxic relationship, that may have included intimate partner violence (emotional abuse counts!). In order to truly heal from these relationships, we have to understand what happened in them.
Learning about the abuse has two main functions:
One - It helps us process the memories in our frontal cortex so that we can remove them from being stuck in the hippocampus. When memories are stuck there, we experience them as PTSD or trigger or activating responses. In other words, the confusing memories are stuck in our bodies and get expressed as surprising reactions from out of nowhere.
Two - It teaches us what happened so we don't get in those relationships again! So many times, people will leave abusive relationships, only to get into another one, or one that is toxic and controlling, so it doesn't seem as bad as the abusive relationship, but it still hurts.
Do yourself a favor and learn what happened so you can heal and not experience that hurt again!
I am a mental health therapist and a domestic violence survivor. I have extensive training and personal experience with this topic, and I have taught this content to other domestic survivors hundreds of times. I know it helps people!
This workbook will teach you about all the components of abuse so you can understand what happened to you, which will help you heal. It also includes coping tools to help regain your self-esteem; and meditations and journal prompts.
Sections inside this workbook:
1. Introduction - Life is a Journey
2. Power and Control Wheel, and Nonviolence Wheel
3. Cycle of Violence
4. Love Bombing and Setting Boundaries
5. Trauma Bonding and Codependency
6. Safety Planning
7. Trauma in the Brain
8. Deconstructing Communication
From clinical psychologist and expert in narcissistic relationships Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a guide to protecting and healing yourself from the daily harms of narcissism
AN OPEN FIELD PUBLICATION FROM MARIA SHRIVER
It’s not always easy to tell when you’re dealing with a narcissistic person. One day they draw you in with their charm and charisma, the next they gaslight you, wreck your self-esteem, and leave you wondering, What should I have done differently? As Dr. Ramani explains in It’s Not You, the answer is: absolutely nothing.
Just as a tiger can’t change its stripes, a narcissist will not stop manipulating and invalidating you, no matter how much you try to appease them. The first step toward healing from their toxic influence—and to protect yourself from future harm—is to accept that you are not to blame for their behavior.
Drawing on more than two decades of studying the landscape of narcissism and working with survivors, Dr. Ramani explores how narcissists hijack our well-being and offers a healing path forward. Unpacking the oft-misunderstood personality, she reveals the telltale behavioral patterns that indicate you may be dealing with a narcissist. Along the way, you’ll learn how to become gaslight resistant, chip away at the trauma bonds that keep you stuck in the cycle, grieve the loss of these painful relationships, create and maintain realistic boundaries, discern unhelpful behaviors from narcissistic behaviors, and recover your sense of self after constant invalidation.
Thriving after, or even during, a narcissistic relationship can be challenging, but It’s Not You shows you it is possible. Dr. Ramani invites you to stop blaming yourself and trying to change the narcissistic person, and to start giving yourself permission to let go of their hold on you and finally embrace your true self.
For seventeen years The Betrayal Bond has been the primary source for therapists and patients wrestling the effects of emotional pain and harm caused by exploitation from someone they trusted.
Divorce, litigation, incest and child abuse, domestic violence, kidnapping, professional exploitation and religious abuse are all areas of trauma bonding. These are situations and relationships of incredible intensity or importance lend themselves more easily to an exploitation of trust or power.
In The Betrayal Bond, Dr. Carnes presents an in-depth study of these relationships; why they form, who is most susceptible, and how they become so powerful. Dr. Carnes also gives a clear explanation of the bond that compels people to tolerate the intolerable, and for the first time, maps out the brain connection that makes being with hurtful people comparable to 'a drug of choice.' Most importantly, Carnes provides practical steps to identify compulsive attachment patterns and ultimately to change or end them for good.
Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.
In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score).
Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.
Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.
The #1 bestseller that has helped heal millions of readers, this modern classic holds the key to understanding codependency and unlocking its hold on your life.
Melody Beattie’s compassionate and insightful look into codependency—the concept of losing oneself in the name of helping another— has helped millions of readers understand that they are powerless to change anyone but themselves and that caring for the self is where healing begins.
Is someone else's problem your problem? If, like so many others, you've lost sight of your own life in the drama of tending to a loved one’s self-destructive behavior, you may be codependent--and you may find yourself in this book. With instructive life stories, personal reflections, exercises, and self-tests, Codependent No More helps you to break old patterns, maintain healthy boundaries, and say no to unhealthy relationships. It offers a clear and achievable path to freedom and a lifetime of healing, hope, and happiness.
This ground-breaking book is even more relevant today, as readers confront new, urgent challenges with greater self-awareness, than it was when it first entered the national conversation over 35 years ago.
Have you ever wondered "Why did I do that?" or "Why can't I just control my behavior?" Others may judge our reactions and think, "What's wrong with that person?" When questioning our emotions, it's easy to place the blame on ourselves; holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It's time we started asking a different question.
Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”
Here, Winfrey shares stories from her own past, understanding through experience the vulnerability that comes from facing trauma and adversity at a young age. In conversation throughout the book, she and Dr. Perry focus on understanding people, behavior, and ourselves. It’s a subtle but profound shift in our approach to trauma, and it’s one that allows us to understand our pasts in order to clear a path to our future—opening the door to resilience and healing in a proven, powerful way.
In this groundbreaking bestseller, Lundy Bancroft—a counselor who specializes in working with abusive men—uses his knowledge about how abusers think to help women recognize when they are being controlled or devalued, and to find ways to get free of an abusive relationship.
He says he loves you. So...why does he do that?
You’ve asked yourself this question again and again. Now you have the chance to see inside the minds of angry and controlling men—and change your life. In Why Does He Do That? you will learn about:
• The early warning signs of abuse
• The nature of abusive thinking
• Myths about abusers
• Ten abusive personality types
• The role of drugs and alcohol
• What you can fix, and what you can’t
• And how to get out of an abusive relationship safely