<aside> 💡 All stories in this book contain upsetting, potentially triggering topiccs. So, I’m still figuring out if/how to include a “summary” of the book with adequate warnings. But, for now, I’ll focus on nuggets of wisdom that I found inspiring relating to healing from trauma and navigating shame.

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About

Lucia Osbourne-Crowley is a journalist from Sydney, currently based in London. This book is part- reflective memoir, part- investigative journalism as she processes her own trauma from sexual violence through the lens of women and non-binary folks who have trauma stored in their body (not just from sexual violence). Furthering discourse from books like The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma and Healing the Shame that Binds You, this book suggests ways for individuals to think about their own healing their own trauma through connection with other stories and individuals.

Osbourne-Crowley found interviewees via call-outs on Twitter and Instagram “wanting to speak to women and non-binary folk about their relationships with their bodies”. Ended up interviewing hundreds of participants.

“The idea of finding a new language to hold your experiences in is, it seems to me, one of the cornerstones of freedom.” (77)

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “fly in a bottle” (1-2)
On writing a semi-autobiographical fictional narrative to overcome shame (9-10)
On Joseph Burgo’s Shame (14-15)
On Feldman-Barrett’s How Emotions are Made (15-16) (is this not added this in the think tank yet??)
On John Bradshaw’s Healing the Shame that Binds You (17-20, 22-23)
On Gabor Matè’s The Body Says No and the “false self” (24-25)
On what non-binary folks taught Osbourne-Crowley about bodies and shame (69-72)
On Expectational fields (137-138)

Other lovely quotes quoted by Osbourne-Crowley in the book

“You can be lonely anywhere, but there is particular flavour to loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people” - from Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City

“I am an accumulation of all those sleepless nights and hospital days; of waiting for appointments and wishing I didn’t have to keep them; of the raw keel of boredom and self-consciousness illness is. Without those experiences, I would not be a person who picks up those shards and attempts to reshape them on the page. If I had been spared the complicated bones, I would be someone else entirely. Another self another map.” - from Sinèad Gleeson’s Constellations

Osbourne-Crowley’s gorgeous follow-up to Gleeson, what I interpret as on the importance of what we refer to as “self-actualization”