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.