The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Bessel van der Kolk MD

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 over 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. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma

Pete Walker

Key concepts of the book include managing emotional flashbacks, understanding the four different types of trauma survivors, differentiating the outer critic from the inner critic, healing the abandonment depression that come from emotional abandonment and self-abandonment, self-reparenting and reparenting by committee, and deconstructing the hierarchy of self-injuring responses that childhood trauma forces survivors to adopt. The book also functions as a map to help you understand the somewhat linear progression of recovery, to help you identify what you have already accomplished, and to help you figure out what is best to work on and prioritize now. This in turn also serves to help you identify the signs of your recovery and to develop reasonable expectations about the rate of your recovery.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies for Trauma, 2nd Edition

Victoria M. Follette, Josef I. Ruzek

This volume presents cutting-edge cognitive and behavioral applications for understanding and treating trauma-related problems in virtually any clinical setting. Leading scientist-practitioners succinctly review the “whys,” “whats,” and “hows” of their respective approaches. Encompassing individual, group, couple, and parent-child treatments, the volume goes beyond the traditionally identified diagnosis of PTSD to include strategies for addressing comorbid substance abuse, traumatic revictimization, complicated grief, acute stress disorder, and more. It also offers crucial guidance on assessment, case conceptualization, and treatment planning.

101 Trauma-Informed Interventions: Activities, Exercises and Assignments to Move the Client and Therapy Forward

Linda Curran

This is the workbook that all mental health professionals wish they had at the beginning of their careers. Containing over 100 approaches to effectively deal with trauma, this workbook pulls together a wide array of treatments into one concise resource. Equally useful in both group and individual settings, these interventions will provide hope and healing for the client, as well as expand and solidify the professional’s expertise.

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & restoring Wholeness with The Internal Family Systems Model

Richard C. Schwartz

Discover an empowering new way of understanding your multifaceted mind—and healing the many parts that make you who you are. Is there just one “you”? We’ve been taught to believe we have a single identity, and to feel fear or shame when we can’t control the inner voices that don’t match the ideal of who we think we should be. Yet Dr. Richard Schwartz’s research now challenges this “mono-mind” theory. “All of us are born with many sub-minds—or parts,” says Dr. Schwartz. “These parts are not imaginary or symbolic. They are individuals who exist as an internal family within us—and the key to health and happiness is to honor, understand, and love every part.” Dr. Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems (IFS) model has been transforming psychology for decades. With No Bad Parts, you’ll learn why IFS has been so effective in areas such as trauma recovery, addiction therapy, and depression treatment—and how this new understanding of consciousness has the potential to radically change our lives.

Internal Family Systems Skills Training Manual: Trauma-Informed Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, PTSD & Substance Abuse

Frank Anderson, Richard C. Schwartz, Martha Sweezy

Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) provides a revolutionary treatment plan for PTSD, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders and more.
Using a non-pathologizing, accelerated approach — rooted in neuroscience — IFS applies inner resources and self-compassion for healing emotional wounding at its core. This new manual offers straight-forward explanations and illustrates a wide variety of applications. Easy to read and highly practical.
– Step-by-step techniques
– Annotated case examples
– Unique meditations
– Downloadable exercises, worksheets

Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy

Pat Ogden, Kekuni Minton, Clare Pain, Daniel J. Siegel, Bessel van der Kolk

The body, for a host of reasons, has been left out of the “talking cure.”

Psychotherapists who have been trained in models of psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, or cognitive therapeutic approaches are skilled at listening to the language and affect of the client. They track the clients’ associations, fantasies, and signs of psychic conflict, distress, and defenses. Yet while the majority of therapists are trained to notice the appearance and even the movements of the client’s body, thoughtful engagement with the client’s embodied experience has remained peripheral to traditional therapeutic interventions. Trauma and the Body is a detailed review of research in neuroscience, trauma, dissociation, and attachment theory that points to the need for an integrative mind-body approach to trauma.

Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists

Suzette Boon, Kathy Steele, Onno van der Hart

A patient-oriented manual for complex trauma survivors.

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. Topics include understanding dissociation and PTSD, using inner reflection, emotion regulation, coping with dissociative problems related to triggers and traumatic memories, resolving sleep problems related to dissociation, coping with relational difficulties, and help with many other difficulties with daily life. The manual can be used in individual therapy or structured groups.

Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity

Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Neil J. Smelser, Piotr Sztompka, Bernhard Giesen

In this collaboratively authored work, five distinguished sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of “cultural trauma”—and on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility. Looking at the “meaning making process” as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence, they outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies, including the Nazi Holocaust, slavery in the United States, and September 11, 2001.

Trauma: Explorations in Memory

Cathy Caruth (ed.)

Because traumatic events are unbearable in their horror and intensity, they often exist as memories that are not immediately recognizable as truth. Such experiences are best understood not only through the straightforward acquisition of facts but through a process of discovering where and why conscious understanding and memory fail. Literature, according to Cathy Caruth and others, opens a window on traumatic experience because it teaches readers to listen to what can be told only in indirect and surprising ways. Sociology, film, and political activism can also provide new ways of thinking about and responding to the experience of trauma.

The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment

Babette Rothschild

This book illuminates that physiology, shining a bright light on the impact of trauma on the body and the phenomenon of somatic memory.
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 posttraumatic 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. With an eye to its relevance for clinicians, she consolidates current knowledge about the psychobiology of the stress response both in normally challenging situations and during extreme and prolonged trauma. This gives clinicians from all disciplines a foundation for speculating about the origins of their clients’ symptoms and incorporating regard for the body into their practice. The somatic techniques are chosen with an eye to making trauma therapy safer while increasing mind-body integration.
Packed with engaging case studies, The Body Remembers integrates body and mind in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. It will appeal to clinicians, researchers, students, and general readers.

Treating Trauma-Related Dissociation: A Practical, Integrative Approach

Kathy Steele, Suzette Boon, Onno van der Hart

Establishing safety and working with dissociative parts in complex trauma therapy.

Therapists around the world ask similar questions and struggle with similar challenges treating highly dissociative patients. This book arose not only out of countless hours of treating patients with dissociative disorders, but also out of the crucible of supervision and consultation, where therapists bring their most urgent questions, needs, and vulnerabilities.

The book offers an overview of the neuropsychology of dissociation as a disorder of non-realization, as well as chapters on assessment, prognosis, case formulation, treatment planning, and treatment phases and goals, based on best practices. The authors describe what to focus on first in a complex therapy, and how to do it; how to help patients establish both internal and external safety without rescuing; how to work systematically with dissociative parts of a patient in ways that facilitate integration rather than further dissociation; how to set and maintain helpful boundaries; specific ways to stay focused on process instead of content; how to deal compassionately and effectively with disorganized attachment and dependency on the therapist; how to help patients integrate traumatic memories; what to do when the patient is enraged, chronically ashamed, avoidant, or unable to trust the therapist; and how to compassionately understand and work with resistances as a co-creation of both patient and therapist.

Relational ways of being with the patient are the backbone of treatment, and are themselves essential therapeutic interventions. As such, the book also focused not only on highly practical and theoretically sound interventions, not only on what to do and say, but places strong emphasis on how to be with patients, describing innovative, compassionately collaborative approaches based on the latest research on attachment and evolutionary psychology.

A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD – Compassionate Strategies to Begin Healing from Childhood Trauma

Arielle Schwartz, PhD

Reclaim yourself from childhood trauma–evidence-based strategies for healing complex PTSD Repetitive trauma during childhood can impact your emotional development, creating a ripple effect that carries into adulthood. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) is a physical and psychological response to these repeated traumatic events. A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD contains research-based strategies, tools, and support for individuals working to heal from their childhood trauma. You don’t have to be a prisoner of your past. Learn the skills necessary to improve your physical and mental health with practical strategies taken from the most effective therapeutic methods, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), and somatic psychology. When appropriately addressed, the wounds of your past no longer need to interfere with your ability to live a meaningful and satisfying life. This book includes: Understand C-PTSD–Get an in-depth explanation of complex PTSD, including its symptoms, its treatment through various therapies, and more. Address the symptoms–Discover evidence-based strategies for healing the symptoms of complex PTSD, like avoidance, depression, emotional dysregulation, and hopelessness. Real stories–Relate to others’ experiences with complex PTSD with multiple real-life examples included in each chapter. Start letting go of the pain from your past–A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD can help show you how.

Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing

David A. Treleaven

From elementary schools to psychotherapy offices, mindfulness meditation is an increasingly mainstream practice. At the same time, trauma remains a fact of life: the majority of us will experience a traumatic event in our lifetime, and up to 20% of us will develop posttraumatic stress. This means that anywhere mindfulness is being practiced, someone in the room is likely to be struggling with trauma.
At first glance, this appears to be a good thing: trauma creates stress, and mindfulness is a proven tool for reducing it. But the reality is not so simple.
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. Instructed to pay close, sustained attention to their inner world, survivors can experience flashbacks, dissociation, and even retraumatization.
This raises a crucial question for mindfulness teachers, trauma professionals, and survivors everywhere: How can we minimize the potential dangers of mindfulness for survivors while leveraging its powerful benefits?
Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness offers answers to this question. Part I provides an insightful and concise review of the histories of mindfulness and trauma, including the way modern neuroscience is shaping our understanding of both. Through grounded scholarship and wide-ranging case examples, Treleaven illustrates the ways mindfulness can help―or hinder―trauma recovery.
Part II distills these insights into five key principles for trauma-sensitive mindfulness. Covering the role of attention, arousal, relationship, dissociation, and social context within trauma-informed practice, Treleaven offers 36 specific modifications designed to support survivors’ safety and stability. The result is a groundbreaking and practical approach that empowers those looking to practice mindfulness in a safe, transformative way.

Attachment, Trauma, and Healing: Understanding and Treating Attachment Disorder in Children, Families and Adults

Michael Orlans, Terry M. Levy

Now in a fully updated and expanded edition, Levy and Orlans’ classic text provides a comprehensive overview of attachment theory, how attachment issues manifest, and how they can be treated.

The book covers attachment-focused assessment and diagnosis, specialised training and education for caregivers, treatment for children and caregivers and early intervention and prevention programmes for high-risk families. The authors explain their unique models of ‘corrective attachment therapy’ and ‘corrective attachment parenting’, and provide practical guidance on goals and techniques for clinicians who work with maltreated and attachment disordered children and families. This second edition incorporates advances in the fields of child and family psychology that have occurred since the book first published in 1998, with substantial new sections on interpersonal neurobiology, adult and couple treatment, the application of positive psychology.

Clear, authoritative and skills-oriented, this is the essential guide to attachment for psychologists, social workers, clinicians, as well as foster and adoptive parents.

Trauma and the Avoidant Client: Attachment-Based Strategies for Healing

Robert T. Muller

How to effectively engage traumatized clients, who avoid attachment, closeness, and painful feelings.

A large segment of the therapy population consist of those who are in denial or retreat from their traumatic experiences. Here, drawing on attachment-based research, the author provides clinical techniques, specific intervention strategies, and practical advice for successfully addressing the often intractable issues of trauma.
Trauma and the Avoidant Client will enhance the skills of all mental health practitioners and trauma workers, and will serve as a valuable, useful resource to facilitate change and progress in psychotherapy.

Introduction to Crisis and Trauma Counseling

Thelma Duffey, Shane Haberstroh

This introductory text integrates evidence-based models and best practices with relational-cultural theory, which is responsive to the many forms of traumatic stress and tragedies that clients experience. It is a unique contribution that emphasizes the power of the connections counselors form with clients and communities in crisis and the means by which counselors can intervene, inspire growth, and promote healing during times of tragedy and loss. Readers will gain vital skills as they learn real-life approaches to crisis work with diverse populations in a variety of settings, including individuals, families, communities, students, military personnel, violence survivors, and clients who are suicidal. The authors provide strength-based, trauma-informed applications of cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral therapy, neurofeedback, mindfulness, and creative practices. In addition, each chapter contains compelling case examples, multiple-choice and essay questions, and key topic discussion prompts to guide student learning and promote classroom discussion.

Life After Trauma, 2nd Ed: A Workbook for Healing

Dena Rosenbloom, Mary Beth Williams

Trauma can turn your world upside down–afterward, nothing may look safe or familiar. This compassionate workbook has already helped tens of thousands of trauma survivors start rebuilding their lives. Full of practical strategies for coping and self-care, the book guides you toward reclaiming a solid sense of safety, self-worth, trust, and control, as well as the capacity to be close to others. The focus is on finding the way forward in your life today, no matter what has happened in the past. The updated second edition has a new section on managing emotions through mindfulness and an appendix on easing the stress of health care visits. Dozens of step-by-step questionnaires and exercises are included.

Trauma therapy and clinical practice: neuroscience, gestalt and the body

Taylor, Miriam

This book weaves together the experience of trauma, neuroscience and Gestalt theory and applies these to clients.
Abstract: This book weaves together the experience of trauma, neuroscience and Gestalt theory and applies these to clients

Treating the Trauma Survivor: An Essential Guide to Trauma-Informed Care

Carrie Clark, Catherine C. Classen, Anne Fourt, Maithili Shetty

Treating the Trauma Survivor is a practical guide to assist mental health, health care, and social service providers in providing trauma-informed care. This resource provides essential information in order to understand the impacts of trauma by summarizing key literature in an easily accessible and user-friendly format. Providers will be able to identify common pitfalls and avoid re- traumatizing survivors during interactions. Based on the authors’ extensive experience and interactions with trauma survivors, the book provides a trauma-informed framework and offers practical tools to enhance collaboration with survivors and promote a safer helping environment. Mental health providers in health care, community, and addictions settings as well as health care providers and community workers will find the framework and the practical suggestions in this book informative and useful.

Transforming The Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists

Janina Fisher

Commitment Therapy to Heal from Post-Traumatic Stress and Trauma-Related Problems

Victoria M. Follette, Jacqueline Pistorello, Steven C. Hayes

If you’ve experienced trauma-whether as a result of common life events like accidents or abusive personal relationships or extraordinary experiences like war or natural disasters-you may find that the pain and emotional unease you feel don’t go away over time. In fact, they may get worse. But the trauma you experienced lies in the unchangeable past. Because of your strength and perseverance, you survived, and now the rest of your life stretches before you. How do you want to live it? Finding Life Beyond Trauma is about living life well after a traumatic event. It uses the powerful techniques of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to help you take a different approach to painful feelings and chart a new course for a rich and meaningful life.

First, you’ll learn to accept the pain, sadness, and anxiety that can arise in connection to your trauma. By exploring mindfulness techniques, you’ll be able to remain present with painful feeings and stop avoiding the thoughts and situations that bring them up. Instead of focusing on the past, you’ll clarify what you want your life to be about right now and in the future. With your values clearly in mind, commit to actions that will express them in your life-guided by the powerful tools you’ll find in this book.

Attachment-Focused Trauma Treatment for Children and Adolescents: Phase-Oriented Strategies for Addressing Complex Trauma Disorders

Niki Gomez-Perales

Attachment-Focused Trauma Treatment for Children and Adolescents brings together two powerful treatment directions that exponentially expand the knowledge and skills available to child and adolescent trauma therapists. The book provides theoretical knowledge, clinical approaches, and specific, detailed techniques that clinicians will find indispensable in the treatment of the most challenging and high-risk young trauma victims. Also included are case studies, developed from over three decades of experience, that show the reader how to use the techniques in real-life settings. The treatment approach described here is flexible enough to adapt to real clients in the real world, regardless of trauma and attachment histories, family and living situations, or difficulties engaging in supportive therapeutic relationships. Clear and cohesive, the model presented here allows room for the individuality and approach of each therapist so that the therapeutic relationship can evolve in a genuine and unique way. An appendix of photocopiable worksheets gives interactive tools for therapists to immediately use with clients.

Training for Change: Transforming Systems to be Trauma-Informed, Culturally Responsive, and Neuroscientifically Focused

Alisha Moreland-Capuia

This book offers an integrated training and coaching system to facilitate change in systems that serve youth (education, healthcare, and juvenile justice). The integrated training and coaching system combines brain development, cultural responsivity, and trauma-informed practices. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the neurobiology of fear, brain development, trauma, substance use, and mental health, structural bias and environmental factors that pose a threat to healthy brain development. The book employs practical applications/recommendations and case examples that help solidify understanding of key concepts. Each chapter begins with a set of objectives and interactive exercises that builds on the next, thoughtfully challenging the reader (and giving specific, practical ways for the reader) to apply the information presented with the goal of “change”. The text is written from the perspective of a trauma-informed addiction psychiatrist who has effectively facilitated systems change.

Topics featured in this book include:

Common threats to healthy brain development.
The neurobiology of trauma.
Applying trauma-informed practices and approaches.
Cannabis and its impact on the brain.
Labeling theory and implicit bias.
Exploring the connection between fear and trauma.
Rehabilitation versus habilitation.
Managing stress through mindfulness.
Training for Change will be of interest to graduate and advanced undergraduate students and researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology, criminology, public health, and child and adolescent development as well as parents, teachers, judges, attorneys, preventative medicine and pediatric providers.

Trauma-Informed Healthcare Approaches: A Guide for Primary Care

Megan R. Gerber

Interpersonal trauma is ubiquitous and its impact on health has long been understood. Recently, however, the critical importance of this issue has been magnified in the public eye. A burgeoning literature has demonstrated the impact of traumatic experiences on mental and physical health, and many potential interventions have been proposed. This volume serves as a detailed, practical guide to trauma-informed care. Chapters provide guidance to both healthcare providers and organizations on strategies for adopting, implementing and sustaining principles of trauma-informed care. The first section maps out the scope of the problem and defines specific types of interpersonal trauma. The authors then turn to discussion of adaptations to care for special populations, including sexual and gender minority persons, immigrants, male survivors and Veterans as these groups often require more nuanced approaches. Caring for trauma-exposed patients can place a strain on clinicians, and approaches for fostering resilience and promoting wellness among staff are presented next.

Finally, the book covers concrete trauma-informed clinical strategies in adult and pediatric primary care, and women’s health/maternity care settings. Using a case-based approach, the expert authors provide real-world front line examples of the impact trauma-informed clinical approaches have on patients’ quality of life, sense of comfort, and trust. Case examples are discussed along with evidence based approaches that demonstrate improved health outcomes.

Written by experts in the field, Trauma-Informed Healthcare Approaches is the definitive resource for improving quality care for patients who have experienced trauma.

Trauma-Informed Practices for Early Childhood Educators: Relationship-Based Approaches that Support Healing and Build Resilience in Young Children

Julie Nicholson, Linda Perez, Julie Kurtz

Trauma-Informed Practices for Early Childhood Educators guides child care providers and early educators working with infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and early elementary aged children to understand trauma as well as its impact on young children’s brains, behavior, learning, and development. The book introduces a range of trauma-informed teaching and family engagement strategies that readers can use in their early childhood programs to create strength-based environments that support children’s health, healing, and resiliency. Supervisors and coaches will learn a range of powerful trauma-informed practices that they can use to support workforce development and enhance their quality improvement initiatives.

Trauma-Informed Treatment: The Restorative Approach

Patricia D. Wilcox

Trauma-Informed Care

Evans, Amanda, Coccoma, Patricia

Trauma-Informed Behavioral Interventions

Karyn Harvey

Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education

Alex Shevrin Venet

Educators must both respond to the impact of trauma, and prevent trauma at school. Trauma-informed initiatives tend to focus on the challenging behaviors of students and ascribe them to circumstances that students are facing outside of school. This approach ignores the reality that inequity itself causes trauma, and that schools often heighten inequities when implementing trauma-informed practices that are not based in educational equity.

Trauma-informed Treatment and Prevention of Intimate Partner Violence

Casey T. Taft, Christopher Mark Murphy, Suzannah K. Creech

This book gives mental health professionals the knowledge and practical skills they need to provide effective treatment to individuals who engage in IPV and have a history of exposure to trauma.

Attachment: 60 Trauma-Informed Assessment and Treatment Interventions Across the Lifespan

Christina Reese

Trauma-Informed Forensic Practice

Phil Willmot, Lawrence Jones

Trauma-Informed Forensic Practice argues for placing trauma-informed practice and thinking at the heart of forensic services. It is written by forensic practitioners and service users from prison and forensic mental health, youth justice, and social care settings. It provides a compassionate theoretical framework for understanding the links between trauma and offending. It also gives practical guidance on working with issues that are particularly associated with a history of trauma in forensic settings, such as self-harm and substance use, as well as on working with groups who are particularly vulnerable to trauma, such as those with intellectual disabilities and military veterans. Finally, it considers organisational aspects of delivering trauma-informed care, not just for service users but for the staff who work in challenging and dangerous forensic environments. The book is the first of its kind to address such a broad range of issues and settings. It is aimed at forensic practitioners who wish to develop their own trauma-informed practice or trauma-responsive services. It also provides an accessible introduction to trauma-informed forensic practice for undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Treating Problem Behaviors: A Trauma-Informed Approach

Ricky Greenwald

The book is designed as a user-friendly textbook/manual for mental health professionals. It teaches a trauma-informed treatment approach as an organizing framework for a series of empirically supported interventions including motivational interviewing, cognitive-behavioral skills training, trauma resolution, and relapse prevention. Although it notes the importance of a systemic treatment approach, the focus is on the individual component of treatment.

Essentials of Trauma-Informed Assessment and Intervention in School and Community Settings

Kirby L. Wycoff, Bettina Franzese

Understanding how chronic stress affects child development with step-by-step guidelines for conducting trauma-informed assessments and interventions Children exposed to early negative and adverse experiences may not think, feel, process emotions, behave, respond to, or relate to others the same way that typically developing children do. If psychologists do not appreciate and understand the effects of trauma in the lives of children, they may be working in ways that are not efficient or effective and may actually be providing a disservice to the children and families they serve. This volume provides an overview of the deleterious effects of adverse childhood experiences (also referred to as complex trauma, toxic stress or developmental trauma) on children’s functioning, adjustment, cognitive, social-emotional, behavioral, academic, and neuropsychological outcomes. Complex trauma can alter brain structure and function and throw children off a normal developmental trajectory resulting in a myriad of negative outcomes. In addition, step-by-step guidelines are provided for conducting trauma-informed assessments, treatments, and interventions. Understand how early stressors can affect influence normal development and influence child psychopathology Learn how exposure to early life adversity affects the biological stress systems which can compromise normal brain development Become familiar with the functions and neuropsychological constructs associated with brain regions affected by chronic stress. Identify risk factors that can negatively influence children’s behavioral, social, emotional, cognitive, and academic functioning Identify and use trauma-sensitive assessment instruments and protocols Gather background and family history from a trauma perspective Use evidence-based interventions to best meet each child’s unique needs Essentials of Trauma-Informed Assessment and Interventions in the Schools is essential reading for school, clinical, and related psychologists and their trainers.

Trauma Informed Behaviour Support

EdD Kay Ayre, Govind Krishnamoorthy

This book is a practical guide to developing resilient learners by equipping educators with trauma informed practices and behaviour support strategies.

Doing Psychotherapy: A Trauma and Attachment-Informed Approach

Robin Shapiro

The Body Remembers Volume 2: Revolutionizing Trauma Treatment

Rothschild, Babette

Challenging the notion that clients with PTSD must revisit, review, and process their memories to recover from trauma. The Body Remembers, Volume 2: Revolutionizing Trauma Treatment continues the discussion begun more than fifteen years ago with the publication of the best-selling and beloved The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. This new book is grounded in the belief that the most important goal for any trauma treatment is to improve the quality of life of the client. Therefore, the first prerequisite is that the client be reliably stable and feel safe in his or her daily life as well as the therapy situation. To accomplish this, Babette Rothschild empowers both therapists and clients by expanding trauma treatment options. For clients who prefer not to review memories, or are unable to do so safely, new and expanded strategies and principles for trauma recovery are presented. And for those who wish to avail themselves of more typical trauma memory work, tools to make trauma memory resolution even safer are included. Being able to monitor and modulate a trauma client’s dysregulated nervous system is one of the practitioner’s best lines of defense against traumatic hyperarousal going amok—risking such consequences as dissociation and decompensation. Rothschild clarifies and simplifies autonomic nervous system (ANS) understanding and observation with her creation of an original full color table that distinguishes six levels of arousal. Included in this table (and the discussion that accompanies it) is a new and essential distinction between trauma-induced hypoarousal and the low arousal that is caused by lethargy or depression.

Trauma and Physical Health: Understanding the effects of extreme stress and of psychological harm

Victoria L. Banyard, Valerie J. Edwards, Kathleen Kendall-Tackett

The authors conflate the symptom of chronic fatigue with the discrete disease ME/CFIDS. They cite studies that have studied idiopathic chronic fatigue but pass it off as being about ME/CFIDS. It seems the authors are too smart and educated to have made this rank amateur mistake, which begs the question “why spread misinformation about a very serious disease?” This type of misinformation about ME causes a tremendous amount of iatrogenic morbidity. First, do no harm.

Understanding Trauma and Emotion

Colin Wastell

How do we help the traumatised? How can we better understand someone who has faced death, violence or imprisonment? Traumatic experiences can leave an indelible impression on those involved; one which the person may suppress or re-live with destructive and troubling consequences. For many traumatized individuals, the essence of their trauma is deeply emotional: terror, anger, anxiety. Colin Wastell interprets the modern understanding of the traumatic process and presents his own model based on extensive research. He examines the role of emotion in human function and in particular its role in the experience of trauma and effective trauma treatment. Wastell’s approach is grounded in practical treatment and the way emotion-focused therapy can be used to benefit the therapist and client. Using extensive case studies and making clear links between theory and practice, Wastell presents an innovative practice manual for the counsellor and psychologist interested both in trauma treatment and human emotion.

The Complete Guide to Crisis & Trauma Counseling

Wright, H. Norman

Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past: A Practical Guide for Understanding and Working With Traumatic Memory

Phd, Peter A. Levine & Kolk, Bessel A. M.d van Der [Phd, Peter A. Levine & Kolk, Bessel A. M.d van Der]

In Trauma and Memory, bestselling author Dr. Peter Levine (creator of the Somatic Experiencing approach) tackles one of the most difficult and controversial questions of PTSD/trauma therapy: Can we trust our memories? While some argue that traumatic memories are unreliable and not useful, others insist that we absolutely must rely on memory to make sense of past experience. Building on his 45 years of successful treatment of trauma and utilizing case studies from his own practice, Dr. Levine suggests that there are elements of truth in both camps. While acknowledging that memory can be trusted, he argues that the only truly useful memories are those that might initially seem to be the least reliable: memories stored in the body and not necessarily accessible by our conscious mind.

While much work has been done in the field of trauma studies to address “explicit” traumatic memories in the brain (such as intrusive thoughts or flashbacks), much less attention has been paid to how the body itself stores “implicit” memory, and how much of what we think of as “memory” actually comes to us through our (often unconsciously accessed) felt sense. By learning how to better understand this complex interplay of past and present, brain and body, we can adjust our relationship to past trauma and move into a more balanced, relaxed state of being. Written for trauma sufferers as well as mental health care practitioners, Trauma and Memory is a groundbreaking look at how memory is constructed and how influential memories are on our present state of being.

Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives

Laurence J. Kirmayer, Robert Lemelson, Mark Barad

This book analyzes the individual and collective experience of and response to trauma from a wide range of perspectives including basic neuroscience, clinical science, and cultural anthropology. Each perspective presents critical and creative challenges to the other. The first section reviews the effects of early life stress on the development of neural systems and vulnerability to persistent effects of trauma. The second section of the book reviews a wide range of clinical approaches to the treatment of the effects of trauma. The final section of the book presents cultural analyses of personal, social, and political responses to massive trauma and genocidal events in a variety of societies. This work goes well beyond the neurobiological models of conditioned fear and clinical syndrome of post-traumatic stress disorder to examine how massive traumatic events affect the whole fabric of a society, calling forth collective responses of resilience and moral transformation.

Trauma: Contemporary Directions in Theory, Practice, and Research

Shoshana S. Ringel, Jerrold R. Brandell

Trauma: Contemporary Directions in Theory, Practice, and Research is a comprehensive text on trauma, including such phenomena as sexual abuse, childhood trauma, PTSD, terrorism, natural disasters, cultural trauma, school shootings, and combat trauma. Addressing multiple theoretical systems and how each system conceptualizes trauma, the book offers valuable information about therapeutic process dimensions and the use of specialized methods and clinical techniques in trauma work, with an emphasis on how trauma treatment may affect the clinician. Intended for courses in clinical practice and psychopathology, the book may also be useful as a graduate-level text in the allied mental health professions.

The Trauma Treatment Handbook: Protocols Across the Spectrum

Robin Shapiro

Trauma Counselling

Alida Herbst, Gerda Reitsma