Psychological Trauma

In trauma, when words fail, the body begins to speak. How can clinicians accurately and attentively "hear" the body and understand its messages? Useful both as a text and a professional handbook, Splintered Reflections is a detailed review of the physical symptoms and body-image distortions found after trauma, as well as a textbook of methods aimed at repairing the broken metaphors of the body so that a healthy mind-body relationship can be restored.

Among the various psychotherapeutic techniques explored are Freudian psychoanalytic theory, attachment theory, and trauma theory, all synthesized to form an interlocking framework within which the therapist can effectively listen, and stay with the messages from the patient's body. The reader is guided by detailed clinical examples drawn from an international group of trauma therapists that includes Barry Cohen, Richard Kluft, Bruce Perry, Valerie Sinason, and Onno van der Hart.

Winner of the Blanche Ittleson Award for her research on childhood trauma, clinical professor of psychiatry Terr examines the many ways that trauma has changed not only the children she's treated, but all of us. She demonstrates that traumatized children can be helped, showing that there is hope for the innocent victims of our frightening world.

In this volume leading academics explore the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness, the way in which survivors remember and the representation of these memories in the language and form of their life stories.

Mental health problems among asylum seekers and refugees are becoming a public issue, but awareness of this problem among the mental health community is relatively low. Although advances have been made in the provision of innovative mental health services for asylum seekers and refuges with PTSD, they are not systemized, and not widely known to professionals in the field. A publication offering practical guidelines for the treatment of torture victims and political refugees does not exist. Broken Spirits aims to bring together the works of the most respected mental health professionals-from the U.S. and abroad-and make available the most current knowledge on complex PTSD, forced migration and cultural sensitivity in diagnosis and treatment.

This handbook provides both a conceptual and practical framework for diagnosing, treating, and assessing post-traumatic stress in survivors of violence, abuse, war, ethnocultural problems, political torture, and disaster. The in-depth clinical experience of Williams and Sommer helps define a variety of theories and methods for treating children, adults, families, and other groups with various types of post-tramautic stress disorders. They point to specific new kinds of therapies and types of interventions, and discuss new developments and trends for the treatment of post-traumatic stress. This reference volume, with its lengthy bibliography, is designed for students, teachers, and practitioners in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, social work, medicine, and public health.

Trauma and Recovery is universally recognized as a classic in the field of psychology. In a new afterword written for this edition, Judith Herman describes the controversy that has surrounded her work, the new research that has emerged in the field, and the far-reaching implications that this book has had in trauma situations around the world.

Entering the tumultuous, dissociated world of the adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse presents an intimidating challenge for clinicians. But as the authors of this innovative book argue, therapists must be willing and able to work within the powerful and rapidly shifting relational paradigms of transference and countertransference commonly found in treatment of these patients. Such dual roles enacted in treatment include the unseeing, uninvolved parent and the unseen, neglected child; the sadistic abuser and the helpless, enraged victim; the idealized rescuer and the entitled child; and the seducer and the seduced. This is the first model for treatment of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse that takes advantage of a relational approach and that integrates psychoanalytic thinking with the latest findings from the literature on psychological trauma and sexual abuse. Diverging from a more classical perspective, the authors view dissociation as the means by which a person adapts to and expresses traumatogenic material and by which such patients defend against traumatic memories, affects, and fantasy elaborations emerging into consciousness. The authors also detail how dissociation helps organize the patient's personality and presentation of self. Richly illustrated case examples bring to life the authors' treatment model and show how clinicians can work through the relational paradigms between patient and therapist and, ultimately, reach the core of the patient's deeply buried experiences of self and other.