Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair


Sarah Schulman - 2016
    Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behavior and Traumatized behavior resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.This important and sure to be controversial book illuminates such contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial, and geo-political difference as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion, and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, people with HIV, African Americans, or Palestinians. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, and scapegoating, and how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the "other" to achieve their goals.Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and AIDS historian, and the author of eighteen books. A Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellow, Sarah is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Her novels published by Arsenal include Rat Bohemia, Empathy, After Delores, and The Mere Future. She lives in New York.

Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others


Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky - 2007
    We may feel tired, cynical, numb, or like we can never do enough. These, and other symptoms, affect us individually and collectively, sapping the energy and effectiveness we so desperately need if we are to benefit humankind, other animals, and the planet itself. Through Trauma Stewardship, we are called to meet these challenges in an intentional way--not by becoming overwhelmed but by developing a quality of mindful presence. Joining the wisdom of ancient cultural traditions with modern psychological research, Lipsky offers a variety of simple and profound practices that will allow us to remake ourselves--and ultimately the world.

Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders (Adults): An Evidence-Based Guide


Christine A. Courtois - 2009
    Contributors review the research that supports the conceptualization of complex traumatic stress as distinct from PTSD. They explore the pathways by which chronic trauma can affect psychological development, attachment security, and adult relationships. Chapters describe evidence-based assessment tools and an array of treatment models for individuals, couples, families, and groups.See also Drs. Courtois and Ford's authored book, Treatment of Complex Trauma, which presents their own therapeutic approach for adult clients in depth, and their edited volume Treating Complex Traumatic Stress Disorders in Children and Adolescents.

Abused Boys: The Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse


Mic Hunter - 1989
    Hunter examines the physical and emotional impact of abuse on its victims and the factors affecting revovery. With personal case histories of victims and their families, this is a powerfully written and meticulously researched book that is a landmark in the field of child sexual abuse literature.

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving


Pete Walker - 2013
    I also wrote it from the viewpoint of someone who has discovered many silver linings in the long, windy, bumpy road of recovering from Cptsd. I felt encouraged to write this book because of thousands of e-mail responses to the articles on my website that repeatedly expressed gratitude for the helpfulness of my work. An often echoed comment sounded like this: At last someone gets it. I can see now that I am not bad, defective or crazy…or alone! The causes of Cptsd range from severe neglect to monstrous abuse. Many survivors grow up in houses that are not homes – in families that are as loveless as orphanages and sometimes as dangerous. If you felt unwanted, unliked, rejected, hated and/or despised for a lengthy portion of your childhood, trauma may be deeply engrained in your mind, soul and body. This book is a practical, user-friendly self-help guide to recovering from the lingering effects of childhood trauma, and to achieving a rich and fulfilling life. It is copiously illustrated with examples of my own and my clients’ journeys of recovering. This book is also for those who do not have Cptsd but want to understand and help a loved one who does. This book also contains an overview of the tasks of recovering and a great many practical tools and techniques for recovering from childhood trauma. It extensively elaborates on all the recovery concepts explained on my website, and many more. However, unlike the articles on my website, it is oriented toward the layperson. As such, much of the psychological jargon and dense concentration of concepts in the website articles has been replaced with expanded and easier to follow explanations. Moreover, many principles that were only sketched out in the articles are explained in much greater detail. A great deal of new material is also explored. 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. I hope this map will guide you to heal in a way that helps you to become an unflinching source of kindness and self-compassion for yourself, and that out of that journey you will find at least one other human being who will reciprocally love you well enough in that way.

The Journey: A Roadmap for Self-healing After Narcissistic Abuse


Meredith Miller - 2017
    Invisible abuse is rarely talked about because of how hard it is to pin-point, even by mental health professionals. Fortunately, there is a growing wealth of information available, particularly around the term narcissistic abuse. After discovering the keywords and digging for answers, the next step is what to do about it now. It’s important to understand that leaving the abusive person and educating yourself about the abuse is not the same as healing. This discovery is the actually start of the journey of self-healing after narcissistic abuse. THE JOURNEY is a roadmap out of the suffering and struggle after narcissistic abuse. It is a comprehensive, holistic outline of the recovery process so you can measure where you are and where you want to go in the journey of self-healing. If you want to change anything in life, you’re going to need to measure it somehow. This structure will help you get to the next level and keep moving forward out of the gravity of the past so you can create a life of peace, joy, meaning and purpose.

Supernormal: The Untold Story of Adversity and Resilience


Meg Jay - 2017
    But these experiences are often kept secret, as are our courageous battles to overcome them.Drawing on nearly two decades of work with clients and students, Jay tells the tale of ordinary people made extraordinary by these all-too-common experiences, everyday superheroes who have made a life out of dodging bullets and leaping over obstacles, even as they hide in plain sight as doctors, artists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, parents, activists, teachers, students and readers. She gives a voice to the supernormals among us as they reveal not only "How do they do it?" but also "How does it feel?"These powerful stories, and those of public figures from Andre Agassi to Jay Z, will show supernormals they are not alone but are, in fact, in good company. Marvelously researched and compassionately written, this exceptional book narrates the continuing saga that is resilience as it challenges us to consider whether -- and how -- the good wins out in the end.

On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss


Elisabeth Kübler-Ross - 2005
    Includes a new introduction and resources section.Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying changed the way we talk about the end of life. Before her own death in 2004, she and David Kessler completed On Grief and Grieving, which looks at the way we experience the process of grief. Just as On Death and Dying taught us the five stages of death -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- On Grief and Grieving applies these stages to the grieving process and weaves together theory, inspiration, and practical advice, including sections on sadness, hauntings, dreams, isolation, and healing.

I Don't Have to Make Everything All Better: Six Practical Principles That Empower Others to Solve Their Own Problems While Enriching Your Relationships


Gary B. Lundberg - 1995
    Now, the Lundbergs address an all too common dilemma that arises when others expect you to solve their problems for them, showing readers how they can shed the no-win role of fixer and empower people to solve their own problems through validation--a simple yet profound communication tool that is essential to any healthy relationship. Refreshingly straightforward, this inspiring and entertaining work is poised to become a classic guide for anyone who wishes to improve relationships with their partner, children, colleagues and friends.

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche


Ethan Watters - 2009
    But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In "Crazy Like Us," Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves.For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties." Crazy Like Us" documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases.In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar campaign by one of the world's biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the drug.But this book is not just about the damage we've caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in other cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we begin to understand how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world's therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from other cultures' beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.

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


Arielle Schwartz - 2020
    

Healing for Damaged Emotions (David Seamands Series)


David A. Seamands - 1981
    With over 1,000,000 copies sold, it has helped hundreds of thousands of readers deal successfully with their inner hurts.

Stolen Tomorrows: Understanding and Treating Women's Childhood Sexual Abuse


Steven Levenkron - 2007
    It illustrates the emotional and psychological devastation inflicted on young girls when they experience childhood sexual abuse, exploring varied situations and settings in which this abuse takes place, focusing on the child's experiences at the time of the assault, as well as the emotional, behavioral, and psychological problems that emerge in adolescence and adulthood. A common theme emerges in therapy sessions: self-hatred, low self-esteem, fearfulness, and an abiding sense of personal debasement. But this book offers an uplifting message. In addition to giving therapists and other helpers an empathic insight, Stolen Tomorrows will enable the survivor to recognize herself in both her personal history and her current struggle to overcome the legacy of abuse.

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life


Emily Nagoski - 2015
    So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never exist—but as a result of the research that’s gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women’s sexuality works than we ever thought possible, and Come as You Are explains it all.The first lesson in this essential, transformative book by Dr. Emily Nagoski is that every woman has her own unique sexuality, like a fingerprint, and that women vary more than men in our anatomy, our sexual response mechanisms, and the way our bodies respond to the sexual world. So we never need to judge ourselves based on others’ experiences. Because women vary, and that’s normal.Second lesson: sex happens in a context. And all the complications of everyday life influence the context surrounding a woman’s arousal, desire, and orgasm. Cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines tells us that the most important factor for women in creating and sustaining a fulfilling sex life, is not what you do in bed or how you do it, but how you feel about it. Which means that stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it. Once you understand these factors, and how to influence them, you can create for yourself better sex and more profound pleasure than you ever thought possible.And Emily Nagoski can prove it.

Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers


Karyl McBride - 2008
    The first book for the millions of daughters suffering from the emotional abuse of selfish, self-involved mothers, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? provides the expert advice readers need to overcome debilitating histories and reclaim their lives.