Trauma Disorder

Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.

A new model of therapeutic action, one that heals trauma and dissociation, is overtaking the mental-health field. It is not just trauma, but the dissociation of the self, that causes emotional pain and difficulties in functioning. This book discusses how people are universally subject to trauma, what trauma is, and how to understand and work with normative as well as extreme dissociation. In this new model, the client and the practitioner are both traumatized and flawed human beings who affect each other in the mutual process that the promotes the healing of the client-psychotherapy.

This training manual for patients who have a trauma-related dissociative disorder includes short educational pieces, homework sheets, and exercises that address ways in which dissociation interferes with essential emotional and life skills, and support inner communication and collaboration with dissociative parts of the personality.

Many foster and adoptive parents are raising children with complex emotional trauma, desperate for answers to heal their families. Caught off guard, these families find themselves with shattered dreams, shattered homes, and shattered hearts, with nowhere to turn for answers. Extended family members, friends, and the greater community don't understand the challenges and can, sometimes, add to the problems these families face, prolonging the healing process for all.

Do memories from your past hold you back in ways you can't define?Childhood trauma shapes our adult lives more than we realize. It influences our self-worth, challenges our relationships, and can even impact our health. Yet, many dismiss its effects as mere 'personality quirks.'

Explaining that an impaired capacity for connection to self and to others underlies most psychological and many physiological problems, clinicians Laurence Heller, PhD, and Aline LaPierre, PsyD, introduce the NeuroAffective Relational Model™ (NARM), a unified approach to developmental, attachment, and shock trauma that emphasizes working in the present moment. NARM is a somatically based psychotherapy that helps bring into awareness the parts of self that are disorganized and dysfunctional.

Imagine, if you will, a disease - one that has only subtle outward symptoms but can hijack your entire body without notice; one that transfers easily between parent and child; one that can last a lifetime if untreated. According to Dr. Paul Conti, this is exactly how society should conceptualize trauma: as an out-of-control epidemic with a potentially fatal prognosis. In Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic, Dr. Conti examines the most recent research, clinical best practices, and dozens of real-life stories to present a deeper, richer, and more urgent view of trauma.

Heal trauma. Reclaim your body. Live with wholeness. These are the gifts of utilizing the power of fundamental consciousness-a subtle field of awareness that lies within each of us. In Trauma and the Unbound Body, Dr. Judith Blackstone explores how we can resolve the mental, physical, and emotional struggles of trauma through the power of fundamental consciousness.

From elementary schools to psychotherapy offices, mindfulness meditation is an increasingly mainstream practice. At the same time, trauma remains a fact of life. Drawing on a decade of research and clinical experience, psychotherapist and educator David Treleaven shows that mindfulness meditation - practiced without an awareness of trauma - can exacerbate symptoms of traumatic stress. This raises a crucial question: How can we minimize the potential dangers of mindfulness for survivors while leveraging its powerful benefits?

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent more than three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.

A key objective of treatment for complex PTSD is to confront the traumatic experience. But survivors still reeling from trauma can find this confrontation traumatic. Thirty years of pioneering work with trauma patients made leading German psychotherapist Luise Reddemann realize: It's immensely beneficial to rebuild survivors' sense of self before trauma confrontation. Reddemann incorporates imagination work at every stage of the three-phase treatment model supported by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies - before, during, and after confrontation.

Hope and light are on the horizon to help clients overcome the challenges of healing and releasing the pain of relational trauma. The highly acclaimed Transcending Trauma explores a unique, compassionate, and evidence-based approach to resolving complex and dissociative trauma. In this transformative audiobook, Frank Anderson, MD, masterfully details an IFS path to therapy that allows clients to access their inherent capacity for healing — called self-energy — while also helping them welcome, as opposed to manage, the extreme emotions frequently associated with trauma.

When treating a client who has suffered from interpersonal trauma - whether chronic childhood abuse or domestic violence, for example - talk therapy isn't always the most effective course. For these individuals, the trauma and its effects are so entrenched, so complex, that reducing their experience to a set of symptoms or suggesting a change in cognitive frame or behavioral pattern ignores a very basic but critical player: the body.

Have you ever wondered "Why did I do that?" or "Why can't I just control my behavior?" Others may judge our reactions and think, "What's wrong with that person?" When questioning our emotions, it's easy to place the blame on ourselves; holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It's time we started asking a different question. Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”

It is now thought that people who have been traumatized hold an implicit memory of traumatic events in their brains and bodies. That memory is often expressed in the symptomatology of post-traumatic stress disorder - nightmares, flashbacks, startle responses, and dissociative behaviors. In essence, the body of the traumatized individual refuses to be ignored. While reducing the chasm between scientific theory and clinical practice and bridging the gap between talk therapy and body therapy, Rothschild presents principles and non-touch techniques for giving the body its due.

Clients who have experienced traumatic events and seek EMDR therapists rely on them as guides through their most vulnerable moments. Trauma leaves an imprint on the body, and if clinicians don't know how to stay embodied in the midst of these powerful relational moments, they risk shutting down with their clients or becoming overwhelmed by the process. This book offers an integrative model of treatment that teaches therapists how to increase the client's capacity to sense and feel the body.

Challenges the notion that clients with PTSD must revisit, review, and process their memories to recover from trauma. Multiple therapeutic transcripts illuminate key points in trauma treatment, including stabilizing clients who dissociate, identifying and implementing hidden somatic resources, and utilizing good memories and somatic markers. With an authoritative yet personal voice, Rothschild's book is essential listening for anyone working with those who have experienced trauma.

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?

For years, we've understood the connection between trauma and mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety. But somatic psychology has recently shown that our bodies hold on to trauma, and trauma can manifest in physical symptoms. In addition, we now know that developmental trauma can result in profound emotional stress and lead to serious diseases. Building on this knowledge, this cutting-edge guide offers simple skills for connecting and calming your body, balancing your emotions, and rewiring old patterns of reactivity for better self-regulation.

Most people are familiar with PTSD. But many have not heard of complex PTSD and developmental trauma disorder. As adults, many of us experience symptoms of anxiety and depression. We feel chronically stressed. We have trouble trusting others, or we may even experience feelings of paranoia in our relationships with others. We struggle to define what it is that is bothering us, and we struggle to find ways effective ways to treat it.