Hey Reader,

When I write to you in SETT, I usually talk about the skills and obstacles around emotional intimacy, but in my therapy practice I help people with a wide-range of issues.

Three of the big topics I work with are trauma, grief, and post-punk issues.

One of the reasons I try to acknowledge that intimacy requires emotional skills is that, on a daily basis, I see on how people's nervous system's prevent them from having the kind of closeness they really want.

It's not fair, but the truth is if you have early relational trauma, you're going to need to get extra help with the emotional skill building needed in order to feel safe while getting closer to people.

Therapy is a great place to work on those skills with another living, breathing human. But if you're not ready for that, here are a couple resources I've been reading recently that may be helpful to you.

Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer's Journey Through Trauma is a lovely book. She provides a clear, gentle framework for what engaging in trauma work will likely entail. I've been taking my time reading it because she writes in such a beautiful, compassionate manner.

Stanley Rosenberg's Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve is more technically written, but still approachable. The main strength of the book is that he outlines a number of fairly simple physical exercises that we can do that help our bodies get out of the fight/flight/freeze reactions and back into a more regulated, emotionally-available state.

As a pair I think they work nicely together. Schmelzer provides the broad map of what healing from trauma looks like, and Rosenberg has some concrete, hands-on guidance for resetting our body's reactivity.

Check them out from your library or ask about them at your favorite local bookseller. They're both worth a read.

Until next week,

-Nick