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Healing the Adaptive Child: Poems & Stories
187 pages, Paperback
Published October 22, 2025
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About the author
David Stone
281 books21 followersLibrarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 14, 2026
Healing the adaptive child (second edition), stories and poems by David Stone, a book that takes you on a journey of healing yourself through metaphors of familiarity and comfort.
This book is primarily Stone's experiences with trauma and the things throughout his life in which have opened his mind to healing and how he has grown from a dark place towards the light which is life. There are a lot of raw, versatile words, phrases and extracts within these pages that can be interpreted and applied in many different ways to correspond with the reader.
I found the format of this book interesting, with reflections of childhood, metaphorical tales of trauma experience, poems, text that simplifies trauma responses with comparisons to things we know and fragments of philosophy, in which all come together creating an enlightening book. When reading Healing the adaptive child, I discovered that you sit down with the book and enter someone else's life, though like a puddle on a rainy day you can see fragments of your own reflection.
In some ways this book invites you to sit in reflection of the past and with prose converse with yourself about your memories. Memories so far back that you didn't realize held so much importance in your responses and furthermore of who you are as a person today.
To accompany the text within this book, there are pieces of art by Angie Wakeman. As mentioned somewhere in the book, these pieces sometimes correlate with the text and sometimes they don't though this coincides with healing and everything the book is about.
For the story portion of this book, David Stone uses metaphors to express the injury, trauma and healing process. He does this through tales that are beautifully written. In the many parts of Caliban in Doldrums (one of the stories in this book) we follow along into the deepest, darkest depths of the sea, where the only thing scarier than the darkness are the creatures that live there. With comparisons of the healing journey so well matched to things the brain can comprehend,is enlightening.
Sometimes in books, when trauma, injury and healing are the subject, things almost sound too scientific and technical not really helping you to understand. However this book, Healing the adaptive child, brings stories and poems, basic fragments of prose which where for many used to comfort us as children, and explains things in a way that you can comprehend with ease and I think that is on of the special things about this book.
Personal Favourites (Poems):
Intrusive thoughts for breakfast
The River
Playtime
Anger Issues
The Cult of mum and dad
War Babbies
The Dendritic Child
This book is primarily Stone's experiences with trauma and the things throughout his life in which have opened his mind to healing and how he has grown from a dark place towards the light which is life. There are a lot of raw, versatile words, phrases and extracts within these pages that can be interpreted and applied in many different ways to correspond with the reader.
I found the format of this book interesting, with reflections of childhood, metaphorical tales of trauma experience, poems, text that simplifies trauma responses with comparisons to things we know and fragments of philosophy, in which all come together creating an enlightening book. When reading Healing the adaptive child, I discovered that you sit down with the book and enter someone else's life, though like a puddle on a rainy day you can see fragments of your own reflection.
In some ways this book invites you to sit in reflection of the past and with prose converse with yourself about your memories. Memories so far back that you didn't realize held so much importance in your responses and furthermore of who you are as a person today.
To accompany the text within this book, there are pieces of art by Angie Wakeman. As mentioned somewhere in the book, these pieces sometimes correlate with the text and sometimes they don't though this coincides with healing and everything the book is about.
For the story portion of this book, David Stone uses metaphors to express the injury, trauma and healing process. He does this through tales that are beautifully written. In the many parts of Caliban in Doldrums (one of the stories in this book) we follow along into the deepest, darkest depths of the sea, where the only thing scarier than the darkness are the creatures that live there. With comparisons of the healing journey so well matched to things the brain can comprehend,is enlightening.
Sometimes in books, when trauma, injury and healing are the subject, things almost sound too scientific and technical not really helping you to understand. However this book, Healing the adaptive child, brings stories and poems, basic fragments of prose which where for many used to comfort us as children, and explains things in a way that you can comprehend with ease and I think that is on of the special things about this book.
Personal Favourites (Poems):
Intrusive thoughts for breakfast
The River
Playtime
Anger Issues
The Cult of mum and dad
War Babbies
The Dendritic Child
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