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

Regular price $ 29.00

by Andrea Gutiérrez-Glik

Penguin Life

3/3/2026, hardcover

SKU: 9780593656761

 

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 and filters them through an anti-oppression lens, making sure they're uniquely impactful for all of us.

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, 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 healing.

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.

Reviews:

"Healing the Oppressed Body is a revelation . Andrea Gutiérrez-Glik potently reminds readers that the body is both archive and oracle. Offering a fierce and tender medicine for those of us carrying the weight of systems in our flesh. This book bridges somatic practice, political clarity, and ancestral remembrance. With precision and care, Healing the Oppressed Body shows that embodiment itself is a radical act of resistance, a pathway to sovereignty and collective repair. The book is a permission slip Home--reminding us that our bodies have always known the way home." -- Dr. Jennifer Mullan author of the national best seller Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma & Politicizing Your Practice

"Useful for therapists looking to understand how to integrate work on systemic and generational violence into their practice and for those seeking therapy who want to understand what is out there." -- Susan Raffo, author of Liberated to the Bone

About the Author:

Andrea Gutiérrez-Glik, LCSW, is a psychotherapist specializing in treating OCD, cPTSD, and PTSD, prioritizing women, survivors, and queer and trans folks. She utilizes EMDR, IFS, I-CBT, and ERP to help clients feel safe in the present and come home to themselves. Gutiérrez-Glik is also an EMDRIA-approved consultant for therapists getting certified in EMDR and a regular teacher at Alma, the Trauma of Money(TM), and other mental health organizations. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, on occupied Osage and Kaskaskia land, with her wife and their child.