Trauma-Post-Traumatic Growth
What Happened to You? – rather than What’s Wrong with You?
A client referred me to What Happened to You? – Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry, last Wednesday; I got the book from the library Friday, read it straight through Saturday and Sunday, and am now recommending it to clients, colleagues, and readers as fast as I can; […]
Opposites of Fear in Extreme Distress – Being Brave, Being Safe
I was recently interviewed by Hesna Al Ghaoui, former war correspondent for Hungarian television, now a Fulbright scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, studying fear. Hesna found me through my book Bouncing Back on Audible. We had a mutually illuminating conversation about resilience and post-traumatic growth based on her years of experience covering soldiers and […]
The Flexibility Sequence that Leads to Resilience
In this latest book, The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think about PTSD, George Bonanno, chair of the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology and director of the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, shares the 40 years of research that demonstrates that […]
Pushback on My Definition of Resilience
Abi Blakeslee is an experienced trauma therapist, currently training therapists in Hungary (online through traumahealing.org) in tools to help Ukranian refugees cope with the trauma of the invasion and bombardment of their country. Abi and I were teaching at the recent Psychotherapy Networker Symposium on the same day, so I didn’t get to attend her […]
Recovering from Pandemic Burnout and Fatigue…In Ways That Are Honest and Effective
Many years ago, when I finished writing the manuscript for Bouncing Back and pushed “send” on the computer, I checked in to see what I was feeling after a full year of drafting, editing, polishing…Nothing. I thought that was odd. I had worked so hard, the last month especially, to meet the publisher’s deadline. I […]
For Clinicians: Working with Traumatized Nervous Systems
So many folks are getting wrung out by the challenges of coping with a pandemic that doesn’t seem ready to quit. Whether people were ever traumatized before in their lives, many are experiencing a marked deterioration in functioning and well-being now. NICABM is offering its Treating Trauma Master series to help clinicians help clients resolve […]
The New Normal? Not So Fast…and Not So Easy
Yesterday’s post, Gone Fishin’, mentioned that I hit a wall last week and would show up in your inbox today re-grouped, re-Sourced, recovered, with an attempt at explaining, at least exploring, why. A health scare, resolved, nothing to worry about now, and I’m grateful for that. Profoundly. The wall was noticing that I wasn’t turning […]
A Truth about Trauma
Trauma is a fact of life. It doesn’t have to be a life sentence. – Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing trauma therapy I quote the quote above in most of my clinical trainings on resilience, including a 12-hour training for the Ottawa Centre for the Treatment of Sexual Abuse and Childhood Trauma just last […]
In Times of Cataclysmic Change, Resilience Is Bouncing Back; Post-Traumatic Growth Is Bouncing Forward
Whatever the final, final results of the U.S. national elections this week, practices to strengthen resilience to meet the massive changes on the horizon are going to be helpful. My friend Kathyrn sent me this article, Post-Traumatic Growth Might Be the Silver Lining of Trauma – Here’s How to Harness It by Cassie Shortsleeve in […]
9/11 – Trauma Then and Now
A somewhat heavy post on a somewhat heavy day, yet still offering resources to recover our resilience. Today is the 19th anniversary of 9/11 – the anniversary of a day that sent shock waves throughout the world, killing 2,977 people in New York City, launching a war that has killed 50,000 more in the Middle […]