Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, and Use It for Good

Doula Johnson (The Fourth Trimester) draws on her experience working with women recovering from sexual and birth traumas in this quirky exploration of the physiology of traumatic experiences. She argues that psychotherapy, though helpful to some, can’t help everyone because it is inherently mental and not physical. Instead, she recommends a more active approach through somatic therapy, which involves noticing the physical reactions one has to a difficult or traumatic experience. First, she shows readers how to “listen to [one’s] body” by concentrating on TIMES (thought, image, movement, emotion, and sensation) and how to redirect one’s emotional responses. Unfortunately, her recurrent suggestion to channel the instincts of a wild animal—because it’s through the human body’s animal instincts that the traumatized mind can be mastered—comes off as hokey: be “like a dog, who hears a sound far away and stands at attention with ears perked.” Despite this, readers working through trauma may want to give this a spin. Agent: Stephanie Tade, Stephanie Tade Agency. (Apr.)