Rachel Writes

BOOKS

WHAT KEPT YOU ALIVE: On Trauma, Survival, and What Helps Us Heal

Coming February 23, 2027 - Ghent & Ditlow Publishers - Hardcover, paperback, and ebook; audiobook to follow in May 2027

What kept you alive deserves to be understood.

Fighting. Running. Freezing. Pleasing. Achieving. Keeping watch. Doing it all alone. Whatever yours was, it got you through. It may also still be costing you—in a body that can’t rest, in relationships held at arm’s length, in a life that works on paper and still feels like bracing.

I know this from both chairs. At seven, I carried beer home from the liquor store for my mom. At fifteen, kicked out of the house, I slept on friends’ floors, went to work after school, and kept my grades up. At sixteen, I froze when a stranger put a gun in my face. Decades later, I became a psychotherapist.

Story. Science. You. I tell what happened to me, bring in the research that helps explain it, and then turn to you: what you did to keep going, what it cost, and what can change once the danger has passed but your body hasn’t gotten the word.

This book doesn’t turn trauma into a gift or make it a permanent identity. It asks a different question: How do you honor the person who survived while making room for the life you still get to live?

ARTICLES

“The Long Way In: How a Counselor at Law Finally Became a Counselor,” forthcoming in Counseling Today, March 2027

Attorney and counselor at law: for most of my adult life, those words followed my name, and only the last one felt true. In this essay for Counseling Today’s “My Counseling Journey” column, I write about the day I told my own therapist, “I want to do what you do,” and what I tell new counselors who come to the field the long way: your history and your credential come from the same life, held differently.

For agents and press: rachel@racheldennis.com