Healing Outside the Medical Industrial Complex

A list of healers, resources, and places to learn more

Spiritual and Ancestral Healing

You have a lot of sickness [in the United States] because people are trying to behave in a way that will look “normal,” but that’s one thing the body wasn’t created for: to behave, to be controlled, to live like you are in a prison.”

What if “going crazy” was part of a larger process? What if it was a message from your body, your ancestors, or a wisdom larger than yourself? Thabiso, a traditional Swaziland Healer who moved to the U.S. in 2020, shares his story about training as a healer in a context where madness wasn’t stopped or something to be fixed, but rather the sign of a bigger calling.

Books About Trauma (Beyond The Body Keeps the Score)

Held up as one of the most foundational and cornerstone books about trauma, TBKTS by Bessel Van Der Kolk has largely escaped any mainstream criticism. But some major criticisms from community members include:

  • Status quo politics; Western and Eurocentric perspectives on trauma

  • Lack of analysis around politics, oppression, identity, and trauma

  • Author is accused of various forms of harassment (including sexual harassment), and is kicked out of the organization he started

  • Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and other women who wrote foundational texts prior to TBKTS are never cited

  • Zero preparation or container setting for triggering and terrible descriptions

  • Lack of racial + cultural container or analysis (ex. the first pages of book are about white soldiers with PTSD from killing/raping women & children in war)

Here are some alternative books to try:

  • Trauma and Recovery (Judith Herman)

  • Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (Pete Walker)

  • What My Bones Know (Stephanie Foo)

  • Healing the Soul Wound (Eduardo Duran)

  • The Body Remembers (Babette Rothschild)

  • Black Skin, White Masks (Frantz Fanon)

  • Decolonizing Trauma Work (Renee Linklater)

  • Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Susan Brison)

  • The Generation of Postmemory (Marianne Hirsch)

  • The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice (Staci Haines)

  • The Deepest Well (Dr. Nadine Burke)

  • My Grandmother’s Hands (Resmaa Menakem)

  • Wretched of the Earth (Frantz Fanon)

  • Healing Resistance (Kazu Haga)

  • Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Stef Craps)

  • It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle (Mark Wolynn)

  • Medicine Stories (Aurora Levins Morales)

  • Woman Who Glows in the Dark (Elena Alvia)

  • Waking the Tiger (Peter Levine)

  • We’ve Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health (L.D. Green and Kelechi Ubozoh)

  • The Myth of Normal (Gabor Maté)

  • Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice (Dr. Jennifer Mullan)

  • Wild Indians: Native Perspectives on the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians (Pemina Yellow Bird)

  • How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind (La Marr Jurelle Bruce)