Superfluous Pains: A Life Given Without Consent, But Lived With Intent

Superfluous Pains is a personal collection of essays, poems and micro nonfiction by Dr. Crystallee Crain, her first memoir, is an intimate, candid, and committed to turning private wounds into public work. The pieces translate Dr. Crain’s professional concerns about how institutions respond to violence into lived experience, as she writes openly about family, trauma, race and identity, intimate‑partner violence, and the painful bureaucracies that can re‑injure survivors. The book is both witness and tool: an act of public vulnerability meant to de-stigmatize suffering, model courageous honesty, and invite readers into the hard work of communal repair.Dr. Crain frames these stories as a corrective to the silence many survivors learn early in life—stories deemed “superfluous” by the world - not knowing that sharing is essential to our healing and dignity. The preface and early essays explain why the title matters and how hidden, hushed experiences can begin a path to destruction or to a journey toward repair and self‑recognition . Structured as short memoir vignettes, poems, and reflections (the table of contents includes pieces such as “Beginnings,” “Shame,” “Victim Defendant,” and “Beyond the Body”), the collection is dedicated “to anyone who was taught to hate themselves,” and aims to inspire readers to name, process, and move beyond pain toward thriving.Scattered throughout are practical touch points—useful terminology and reflections grounded in decades of Dr. Crain’s practice in trauma‑informed work, healing‑justice, and community leadership—that connect personal narrative to larger social and political questions she hopes to answer in her work.In short, Superfluous Pains is a humane, reflective memoir-in-essays and poems that combine testimony with tools for understanding and repair—both a personal reckoning and an invitation to readers to witness, reckon, and ideally change. Read more