BOOKS & ARTICLES

Antonieta Contreras loves as writing as much as she loves learning. She published her first book, Traumatization and Its Aftermath, in August of 2023. It won the 2023 Best Books Award and 2024 American Legacy Book Awards in Psychology/Mental Health. The Spanish version came out on September, 2025 in Spain and all of Latin America.

Antonieta's second book, How Deep Is the Wound?, was publishes in September of 2025 and won the 2025 Foreword Indies Awards & the 2026 IPPY awards. The Spanish translation will be published the fall of 2026.

She blogs often here, on Medium, and on PsychologyToday.

You can read the thousands of questions she has answered about trauma, personality disorders, love, sex, and therapy here

Cindy Sample

Your writing has always struck me as the product of someone who has spent equal parts time in the consulting room, in rigorous study, and in the quiet, interior labor of recovery. What distinguishes your contribution is not only your clinical precision, but the grace with which you articulate trauma as an ongoing phenomenon—something that continues to move through the body, interrupt meaning-making, and reshape the contours of daily life. That framing preserves the truth of patients’ suffering while orienting clinicians toward interventions that restore agency, meaning, and the capacity to move forward.

James H. Dickinson

Antonieta, Your insight is incredibly grounding. I’ve read many explanations about trauma, but the way you break it down makes the whole subject feel less frightening and more human. You really have a gift for turning complex emotional realities into something people can understand and feel.

From a judge at the 2026 - IBPA Book Awards 34 - Psychology — Editorial

This book was very well written, with interesting and effective prose and an authoritative and patient tone. The pacing of the writing is very good—smooth to read—and the techniques and exercises are interspersed appropriately. The early descriptions of having agency and pain vs suffering are outstanding - The history and etymology of "emotions" were novel and quite interesting I'll conclude by saying that I appreciate that the need for this book is made extremely clear at the outset: everything is not trauma! And then the book is structured in such a way as to go progressively deeper, which is very effective. This was one of the only books (perhaps the only book) that I gave a "10" for the Writing category, so congratulations on a job well done.