Trauma Is a Thief

Trauma Is a Thief is a memoir(ish) work whose author - a California-based, American, cisgender, White, gay-male psychologist, professor, and former college president - uses his own lived experiences of trauma in a very disturbed family (including sexual and physical abuse, abandonment, and multiple family addictions) to elucidate the developmental and lifelong impact of trauma.



In a deeply personal work, Neal offers his childhood as an illustrative case study as he invites the reader - applying his professional expertise as author, researcher, and clinician - inside his disturbed family and traumatic early life - and the years since as he has struggled in the aftermath toward healing and wholeness.