Healing the Oppressed Body: A Therapeutic Guide for Radical Self-Liberation

An essential guide to healing from oppression-based trauma, for everyone left outside of mainstream conversations

There are many books on trauma healing that can change people’s lives. Yet when queer and trans people, people of color, and all of us living at the margins look for books that reflect our own experiences and that specifically name the oppression we experience as trauma, we’re left empty-handed. There’s little that speaks to the specific traumas we experience: homophobia, transphobia, institutional injustices, isolation, medical trauma, and discrimination at every turn. We deserve to have ourselves reflected and considered in the world of trauma recovery.

In Healing the Oppressed Body, somatic therapist Andrea Gutiérrez-Glik provides the best tools and approaches to healing trauma and filters them through an anti-oppression lens, making sure they’re uniquely impactful for all of us at the margins.

In these pages, you’ll learn how trauma is stored and processed by our minds and bodies and how we can work with our amazingly flexible brains and nervous systems to create pathways to healing. You’ll understand just how and why trauma that occurs in our earliest days can affect us throughout our lives. You’ll learn to embrace your Internal Family, making yourself whole. In Healing the Oppressed Body, Andrea Gutiérrez-Glik lovingly offers us the best, most radical solutions to tap into our sources of healing. Along the way, you’ll discover tools and techniques for emotional regulation and therapeutic modalities to heal from oppression-based trauma.

Whether inside the therapy room or on your own, in the pages of Healing the Oppressed Body, you’ll learn how to heal through growing compassion for all parts of yourself and others, finding community support and love, and celebrating the freedom to be your true self.

Andrea Gutiérrez-Glik, LCSW, is a somatic trauma therapist specializing in treating trauma, nervous system dysregulation, and PTSD and prioritizing women, survivors, and queer and trans folks. She has been featured in such publications as The New York Times, Well+Good, Vice, and NYLON and has thousands of subscribers to her newsletter, Instagram (@somaticwitch), and online courses. She is trained in EMDR, sensorimotor psychotherapy, trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, and trauma-focused psychotherapy. Andrea lives and practices at the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi, and Illinois Rivers on stolen Osage and Sioux land with her wife and their two cats.