Understanding Trauma Before Hashtag Healing
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- Alice Miller, a Polish-Swiss psychoanalyst, published The Drama of the Gifted Child in 1979, followed by Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries in 1988.
- Gloria Steinem's Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem was published by Little, Brown in 1992, selling over 500,000 copies in its first year.
- Jean J. Jenson's Reclaiming Your Life, published in 1996, introduced regression therapy techniques to a mainstream audience a decade before somatic therapy entered wellness culture.
- Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach, co-founders of The Women's Therapy Centre in London, published Understanding Women in 1983 as part of the second-wave feminist psychology movement.
- As of April 2026, Patina's Health & Fitness collection includes preloved copies of Miller, Steinem, Jenson, Eichenbaum, Orbach, and Jay Martin's work on trauma, identity, and recovery.
Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries — Alice Miller
Quick Verdict: Miller's 1988 follow-up to The Drama of the Gifted Child is sharper, angrier, and more clinically precise — this is the one to read if you're done with metaphors and ready for the mechanism.
Alice Miller wasn't interested in forgiveness or "both sides." Banished Knowledge argues that what we call "normal" childrearing — the casual violence, the silence around abuse, the societal insistence that children "get over it" — produces adults who can't access their own histories. Miller's thesis is blunt: childhood injuries don't heal on their own, and pretending they do protects the abuser, not the survivor. This copy sits alongside her earlier work The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979) and For Your Own Good (1980), but where those books named the wound, this one maps the cover-up. The prose is dry, European, clinical — Miller was a trained psychoanalyst who broke with Freud over his refusal to believe abuse survivors — and the case studies are uncomfortable in the way truly useful books are. Explore our current copy of Banished Knowledge. Browse more Health & Fitness books at Patina.
Reclaiming Your Life: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Regression Therapy to Overcome the Effects of Childhood Abuse — Jean J. Jenson
Quick Verdict: Jenson's 1996 guide is the rare self-help book that treats trauma as a neurological event, not a character flaw — and gives you the somatic tools to work with it.
Jean J. Jenson published this guide a decade before Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score (2014) made "trauma-informed" a household phrase, and it holds up. Regression therapy — the practice of revisiting early memories under guided, safe conditions — was controversial in the 1990s, dismissed as recovered-memory pseudoscience by some clinicians. Jenson's approach is methodical: she walks readers through grounding techniques, breath work, and visualisation exercises designed to access pre-verbal trauma without re-traumatising. The book assumes you've already done the intellectual work (read Miller, read Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery) and are ready to move into the body. It's structured like a workbook, with exercises at the end of each chapter, and the tone is calm, patient, almost maternal — which makes sense, given Jenson's background in maternal mental health. Explore our current copy of Reclaiming Your Life. Browse more Health & Fitness books at Patina.
Understanding Women — Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach
Quick Verdict: Eichenbaum and Orbach's 1983 analysis of female psychology and relational trauma is the missing link between Betty Friedan and modern attachment theory — read it if you've ever wondered why women are so hard on themselves and each other.
Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach (the latter best known for Fat Is a Feminist Issue, 1978) co-founded The Women's Therapy Centre in London in 1976, and Understanding Women grew out of their clinical practice. The book's central argument — that women internalise a "false self" to meet patriarchal expectations, then project that self-hatred onto other women — prefigures decades of feminist psychology. It's not an easy read; Eichenbaum and Orbach write in dense, post-Freudian prose, and they assume you've read Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering (1978). But the case studies are revelatory, particularly the chapters on mother-daughter relationships and female friendships. This is the book that explains why so many women struggle to ask for what they need, even from people who love them. Explore our current copy of Understanding Women. Browse more Health & Fitness books at Patina.
Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem — Gloria Steinem
Quick Verdict: Steinem's 1992 memoir-manifesto is the one that asks: what happens when the feminist icon admits she spent decades fighting for others because she couldn't fight for herself?
Gloria Steinem published Revolution from Within at 58, after a lifetime of organising, writing, and being held up as the face of second-wave feminism. The book's thesis — that political change without internal healing is unsustainable — was controversial among her peers, some of whom saw it as a retreat into navel-gazing. But Steinem's argument is sharper than that: she traces her own low self-esteem back to a childhood spent caring for a mentally ill mother, and argues that women's external oppression and internal shame are two sides of the same system. The book blends memoir, self-help exercises, and political analysis in a way that would now be called "intersectional" but in 1992 was just called messy. It's uneven — the guided meditations in the middle drag — but the sections on body image, ageing, and the lie of "having it all" are bracingly honest. Explore our current copy of Revolution from Within. Browse more Health & Fitness books at Patina.
Who Am I This Time: Uncovering the Fictive Personality — Jay Martin
Quick Verdict: Martin's 1988 study of "fictive personalities" — people who construct alternate selves to survive trauma — is the academic cousin to Miller's clinical work, and just as unsettling.
Jay Martin, a professor of English and comparative literature at USC, published Who Am I This Time as a cross-disciplinary study of identity fragmentation. The title comes from a Kurt Vonnegut story, but the subject is deadly serious: Martin examines case studies of people who live "as if" they're someone else — not through dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder), but through narrative self-construction. He draws on Freud, Lacan, literary theory, and clinical case files to argue that we all, to some extent, narrate ourselves into being, and that trauma survivors do it more intensely because the "real" self is too painful to inhabit. It's dense, academic prose — this was published by a university press, not a trade house — but the central insight is profound: identity isn't discovered, it's built, and childhood trauma forces you to build it earlier and faster than you should. Explore our current copy of Who Am I This Time. Browse more Health & Fitness books at Patina.
These books share a timeline — 1979 to 1996 — and a refusal to look away. They were written before "trauma-informed" became a badge, before therapy became content, before healing got a hashtag. They're harder, slower, and less forgiving than what came after, which is exactly why they're worth your time. Shop all Health & Fitness books at Patina Paperbacks →
Where can I buy secondhand Alice Miller books in Sydney?
Patina Paperbacks stocks rotating preloved copies of Alice Miller's work, including Banished Knowledge and The Drama of the Gifted Child, and ships Australia-wide from our Sydney base. Our Health & Fitness collection turns over regularly, so if you're after a specific Miller title, check back — or grab what's live now before it walks.
Is Gloria Steinem's Revolution from Within still relevant in 2025?
Honestly, yes. Steinem's argument — that feminist politics fail without internal recovery work — has aged better than the self-help market that followed it. The book predates Instagram therapy by two decades, which means it treats self-esteem as a structural issue, not a personal brand. The guided meditations in the middle feel dated, but the sections on ageing, body image, and intergenerational trauma are sharper than most contemporary wellness writing.
What's the difference between Alice Miller and Bessel van der Kolk on trauma?
Alice Miller, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, focused on childhood emotional abuse and the societal denial around it; her work is psychoanalytic, clinical, and laser-focused on the parent-child dynamic. Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score (2014) is neuroscience-based, somatic, and broader in scope — it covers war trauma, sexual violence, and complex PTSD alongside childhood abuse. Miller is the sharper scalpel; van der Kolk is the wider lens. Read both.
What books should I read before Jean J. Jenson's Reclaiming Your Life?
Start with Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979) or Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery (1992) for the theoretical groundwork, then move into Jenson. Her guide assumes you already understand how trauma lodges in the body and are ready for somatic exercises. If you jump straight to Jenson without the context, the regression techniques might feel untethered — she's building on a foundation, not laying one.
Are Eichenbaum and Orbach's books still in print?
Some are, some aren't — Understanding Women has had multiple reprints, but availability fluctuates. That's where preloved copies shine: you're not waiting on a publisher's reissue schedule, and you're often getting the original 1983 edition with its intact footnotes and references. Patina's stock rotates, so if you see a clean copy of Understanding Women or their follow-up What Do Women Want (1983), grab it.