How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain
About this ebook
In How Deep Is the Wound? psychotherapist and neuroscience writer Antonieta Contreras turns today’s trauma-saturated conversation on its head. With equal parts science and story, she shows why not every hurt is a life-shattering injury—and how confusing ordinary adaptation with true survival panic keeps us stuck, anxious, and chronically exhausted.
Moving from playground betrayals to ICU nightmares, each chapter asks a disarming question—Is this a bruise, a cut, or a break?—then teaches you to read the body-brain clues that reveal the wound’s actual depth. You’ll learn:
Why the same breakup can spark resilience in one person and hyper-vigilance in another
How guilt, shame, and loneliness hijack the pain circuits we once reserved for physical injury
A step-by-step “emotional triage” method to stop over-pathologizing normal distress and start healing what truly needs repair
Packed with case vignettes, myth-busting graphics, and “observing-self” exercises you can try in five minutes, How Deep Is the Wound? replaces hopeless labels with practical tools and a radical reminder: your mind is wired to mend.
Turn the page to find out which hurts need urgent tending, which will fade with time—and which might just become the strongest part of you.
About the author
Antonieta Contreras, a former banker and consultant, is a Gestalt-trained psychotherapist who graduated as a social worker from NYU. After a few years working at agencies with highly traumatized people, she went on to get a specialization in trauma studies from the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapies (ICP) and in human sexuality from the School of Medicine of NYU. She maintains a private practice in NYC where she combines the different modalities that are concerned with trauma, as well as the contemplative techniques that she learned in India and from the Tibetan Buddhist traditions. She has served as a board member of several nonprofit organizations. She is a supervisor, faculty member, and presenter at different institutions, including ICP, NYU, ISSTD, ESTD, NYCATT, etc. She also codirected the Integrated Trauma Studies Program at ICP for several years. She’s the author of the award-winning book Traumatization and Its Aftermath (Routledge, 2023).
