It's My Life Now: Starting Over After an Abusive Relationship or Domestic Violence


Meg Kennedy Dugan - 2000
    However, survivors know that leaving is not the end of the nightmare -- it is the beginning of an often difficult and challenging journey toward healing and happiness. It s My Life Now offers readers the practical guidance, emotional reassurance, and psychological awareness that survivors of relationship abuse and domestic violence need to heal and reclaim their lives after leaving their abusers.Since its publication in 2000, It's My Life Now has been highly successful as a working manual for survivors who are starting their lives over after an abusive relationship. This valuable book combines direction on practical and emotional issues with worksheets and self-exploration exercises. Now, in the second edition, Dugan and Hock include updated information and resources while encompassing a wider range of individuals and the relationships in which abuse and violence occur. The new edition also provides a new emphasis on safety assessment, which has increasingly been shown to be a critical factor in recovery. In addition, this new edition includes current resources and information about organizations for victims along with revised and enhanced strategies to help survivors move forward on the path of recovery."

Building the Bonds of Attachment: Awakening Love in Deeply Troubled Children


Daniel A. Hughes - 2006
    This work is a composite case study of the developmental course of one child following years of abuse and neglect. Building the Bonds of Attachment focuses on both the specialized psychotherapy and parenting that is often necessary in facilitating a child's psychological development and attachment security. It develops a model for intervention by blending attachment theory and research, trauma theory, and the general principles of parenting, and child and family therapy. This book is a practical guide for the adult--whether professional or parent--who endeavors to help such children. The second edition of this widely popular book will present the many changes in the intervention model over the past 8 years. These include many changes in both the psychotherapist's and parent's interventions. The attachment history of the adults is made more relevant. There is greater congruence between attachment theory and research and the interventions being demonstrated as well as greater reference to this theory and research.

Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting


Lisa Genova - 2021
    You might even be worried that these lapses in memory could be an early sign of Alzheimer's or dementia. In reality, for the vast majority of us, these examples of forgetting are completely normal. Why? Because while memory is amazing, it is far from perfect. Our brains aren't designed to remember every name we hear, plan we make, or day we experience. Just because your memory sometimes fails doesn't mean it's broken or succumbing to disease. Forgetting is actually part of being human. In Remember, neuroscientist and acclaimed novelist Lisa Genova delves into how memories are made and how we retrieve them. You'll learn whether forgotten memories are temporarily inaccessible or erased forever and why some memories are built to exist for only a few seconds (like a passcode) while others can last a lifetime (your wedding day). You'll come to appreciate the clear distinction between normal forgetting (where you parked your car) and forgetting due to Alzheimer's (that you own a car). And you'll see how memory is profoundly impacted by meaning, emotion, sleep, stress, and context. Once you understand the language of memory and how it functions, its incredible strengths and maddening weaknesses, its natural vulnerabilities and potential superpowers, you can both vastly improve your ability to remember and feel less rattled when you inevitably forget. You can set educated expectations for your memory, and in doing so, create a better relationship with it. You don't have to fear it anymore. And that can be life-changing.

Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being


Linda Graham - 2013
    While resilience is innate in the brain, over time we learn unhelpful patterns, which then become fixed in our neural circuitry. But science is now revealing that what previously seemed hardwired can be rewired, and Bouncing Back shows us how. With powerful, time-tested exercises, Linda Graham guides us in rebuilding our core well-being and disaster-proofing our brains.

The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease


Robert C. Scaer - 2001
    The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease presents evidence of the resulting and relatively permanent alteration in neurophysiology, neurochemistry, and neuronal organization. This book convincingly demonstrates that these changes create lasting effects on the emotional and physical well-being of the victim--changes correlated with many of the most common, yet poorly understood, physical complaints and diseases, including whiplash, migraines, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and other painful, difficult-to-treat conditions. Further, the causes and effects of retraumatization are explored, clarifying the reasons some patients suffer fresh trauma over relatively minor incidents while others handle major traumas more easily. This groundbreaking volume backs up its new theory of PTSD neurophysiology with cogent theory and persuasive evidence, including:case studies correlating clinical features of trauma and dissociation with compelling physiological rationales for the symptomssolid documentation drawing from the medical and psychiatric literature of PTSD, whiplash, brain injury, epidemiology of trauma, and a variety of disease processes linked to traumain-depth discussions of medical traumatization of patients, including the results of pediatric procedures and ineffective anesthesiademonstrations that somatization and conversion are not imagined symptoms but result from measurable autonomic physiological alteration of the affected organa well-documented exploration of the effect of prenatal and neonatal trauma on later emotional development, response to traumatic life events, and disease and mortalityThis impressive empirical evidence that body, brain, and mind are a continuum offers a powerful new paradigm to medical and mental health professionals, as well as new hope to sufferers from trauma. With a foreword by Bessel van der Kolk and helpful figures, The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease is an essential resource for the in-the-trenches professionals who confront the effects of trauma and resulting somatic consequences. It will be of compelling interest and usefulness to family practice physicians, nurses and nurse practitioners, speech and physical therapists, counselors and psychotherapists, and any medical or mental health professional who treats physical or emotional trauma.

POWER: Surviving and Thriving After Narcissistic Abuse: A Collection of Essays on Malignant Narcissism and Recovery from Emotional Abuse


Shahida Arabi - 2017
    Covert and overt put-downs. Triangulation. Gaslighting. Projection. These are the manipulative tactics survivors of malignant narcissists are unfortunately all too familiar with. As victims of silent crimes where the perpetrators are rarely held accountable, survivors of narcissistic abuse have lived in a war zone of epic proportions, enduring an abuse cycle of love-bombing and devaluation—psychological violence on steroids. From how to heal our addiction to the narcissist to how to recognize a covert narcissist, Shahida Arabi's articles on narcissistic abuse have gained renown as some of the most accurate and in-depth depictions of this terrifying trauma, resonating with millions of survivors all over the world and receiving endorsements from numerous mental health professionals. In this essay compilation, readers can enjoy some of her most popular articles as well as new thought pieces on narcissistic abuse: what therapists have to say about malignant narcissists and how children of narcissistic parents can become trapped in the trauma repetition cycle. Survivors are offered new insights on what it means to be both a survivor and a thriver of covert manipulation and trauma. POWER teaches us that it is important to not only understand the tactics of toxic personalities but also to recognize and combat the effects of narcissistic abuse; it guides the survivor to learning, growing, healing and most importantly of all—owning their agency to rebuild their lives and transform their powerlessness into victory.

Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person


Anna Mehler Paperny - 2019
    Illuminating, completely engaging—it's essential reading for all since we all know someone whose life, family or friends are touched by the disease that directly afflicts a fifth of Canadians. In her early twenties, while outwardly thriving in her dream job and enjoying warm familial support and a strong social network, award-winning journalist Anna Mehler Paperny found herself trapped by feelings of failure and despair. Her first suicide attempt—ingesting a deadly mix of sleeping pills and antifreeze—landed her in the ICU, followed by weeks of enforced detention that ran the gamut of horrifying, boring, hilarious, and absurd. This was Anna's entry into the labyrinthine psychiatric care system responsible for providing care to millions of Canadians.As she struggled to survive the psych ward and as an outpatient—enduring the "survivor's" shame of facing concerned family, friends, and co-workers; finding (or not) the right therapist, the right meds; staying healthy, insured, and employed—Anna could not help but turn her demanding journalist's eye on her condition and on the system in which she found herself. She set off on a quest to "know her enemy," interviewing leading practitioners in the field across Canada and the US—from psychiatrists to neurological experts, brain-mapping pioneers to heroic family practitioners, and others dabbling in novel hypotheses. She reveals in courageously frank detail her own experiences with the pharmacological pitfalls and side effects of long-term treatment, and offers moving case studies of conversations with others, opening wide a window into how we treat (and fail to treat) the disease that accounts for more years swallowed up by disability than any other in the world.

The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma


James S. Gordon - 2019
    S. military. Dr. Gordon and his team have also used their work to help middle class professionals, stay-at-home mothers, inner city children of color, White House officials, medical students, and people struggling with severe emotional and physical illnesses.Transforming Trauma represents the culmination of Dr. Gordon’s fifty years as a mind-body medicine pioneer and an advocate of integrative approaches to overcoming psychological trauma and stress. Offering inspirational stories, eye-opening research, and innovative prescriptive support, Transforming Trauma makes accessible for the first time the methods that Dr. Gordon—with the help of his faculty of 160, and 6,000 trained clinicians, educators, and community leaders—has developed and used to relieve the suffering of hundreds of thousands of adults and children around the world.