Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

trauma

“Waking” by Matthew Sanford

by Leave a Comment

Subtitle: A memoir of trauma and transcendence

Matt was paralyzed from the chest down at the age of 13 in a winter car crash that also killed his father and older sister. His book chronicles the numbness and dissociation that help him survive his first months and years of recovery, and his later reconnection with his body. The book includes the beautifully functional family relationships that helped sustain him.

The doctors tell him he cannot connect with his legs past his spinal injury. Even though the flesh is connected, with blood circulating in and out of the paralyzed areas, they tell him the energy he senses is just in his imagination, denial, wishful thinking.

He remembers his father doing yoga alone in the basement long before it became popularly accepted in the US. He finds a yoga teacher, Jo Zukovich, with the intuition and imagination to work with him and begins reconnecting with his body. Along the way he experiences the flashbacks and body memories of healing trauma.

He and Jo discover that “alignment and precision increase mind-body integration regardless of paralysis.” Matt writes,

“If I listen inwardly to my whole experience (both my mind’s and my body’s), my mind can feel into my legs. […] It is simply a matter of learning to listen to a different level of presence, to realizing that the silence within my paralysis is not loss. In fact, it is both awake and alive. […] The silence that helped me leave my body and protected me from pain in intensive care is the same silence that helps me energetically connect mind and body.”

Highly recommended for a clear, honest look at trauma, recovery, and living well with disabilities. Prepare to have your unconscious stereotypes about “poor, wheelchair-bound” paraplegics decisively shattered.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Saber es Poder” by Maxine Harris, Fabiana Wallis, Hortensia Amaro

by 2 Comments

Subtitle: Modelo de Trauma y Recuperación para Mujeres Latinas

Translation: Knowledge is Power: Model of Trauma and Recovery for Latina Women

Recommended to me by: Fabiana Wallis’ bio at Conexiones

This book is a curriculum for a 25-session trauma recovery support group for Latina women. Since I hope to work with Conexiones Center for Trauma Recovery as a practitioner, my goal was to refresh my Spanish language skills and learn the vocabulary associated with trauma and recovery. It served that goal well.

The book also included specific information about Latino/a culture and issues for immigrants.

I read this book as both a practitioner helping people recover from trauma, and as a daughter of immigrants from Latin America who experienced trauma. I fit the target reader in some ways and not in others, especially since the book assumes a sharp separation between facilitators and group members.

The information was very basic, aimed at group participants who had never thought about trauma and its connection to present behaviors. There was recurring emphasis on the issues of drug use, prostitution, and unprotected sex. There was no discussion of the mechanisms of PTSD in the body.

In the various units, I saw identification of the damage wrought by trauma, but less help in building new skills than I expected. I imagine a woman reaching the end of the support group and thinking, “Now what?!” At the same time, I imagine that the opportunity to speak about past trauma and receive support would be healing in itself.

When used by knowledgeable and compassionate group facilitators, I think this book would form the basis for a useful, culturally aware support group for Latina survivors of abuse.

“Poppies on the Rubbish Heap” by Madge Bray

by Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Sexual Abuse, The Child’s Voice

Madge Bray shares her journey as a child advocate social worker, along with several abused children’s case histories. Woven through the book is the history of recognition and backlash around the sexual abuse of children. Madge Bray pioneered the use of toys and play therapy to elicit children’s stories and help them heal.

The toys include anatomically correct dolls, angry puppets, and a battery-operated rabbit that trembles silently. Madge Bray offers a neutral, welcoming space for the children to interact with the toys and find self-expression. She enters into their world rather than demanding that they communicate in adult ways.

The book is intense and riveting. It tells of catastrophic abuse from the wounded child’s perspective, as the child is heard and helped. It tells of victorious court battles as well as one story about a child whose parents withdrew him from therapy before he could tell his story.

Recommended as a look into social work with children in England, the realities of child sexual abuse, and the healing power of deep listening.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Unlimited…” by Ani Rose Whaleswan

by Leave a Comment

This is a book of 18 poems and 13 paintings about Ani Rose Whaleswan’s healing from extreme abuse. From the back cover: “She believes too that art is healing, and healing is an art.”

The paintings are colorful, vivid, powerful. Each one is accompanied by a paragraph of background or interpretation.

The poems are concrete, metaphorical, full of truth and clarity.

“Life is abundant in the soft places
The broken spaces between hard things.”

Recommended as a window into individual and universal healing.

Available at CreateSpace.

“Tender Morsels” by Margo Lanagan

by Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Meloukhia

This is a fairy tale, but no child’s story. It starts with incest and pregnancy and abortion, and continues with gang rape. Then Liga is magically placed in a world that matches her heart’s desire, peaceful and safe.

While examining the consequences of assault and the consequences of avoiding trauma, the story sings along, full of prickly, kind characters and vivid details.

Recommended, for a true look at life in fairy tale guise.

An interview with Margo Lanagan.

Jody Hewgill (the cover artist)’s portfolio.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Myth of Sanity” by Martha Stout, Ph.D.

by Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness; Tales of Multiple Personality in Everyday Life

Recommended to me by: a client

This book contains a therapist’s compassionate, engaging views on people who have Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder) and how they can heal. Martha Stout discusses both specific cases and general themes of survival, courage, integrity, and the process of healing.

After trauma, she says the core question is, “Shall I choose to die, or shall I choose to live?” Those who choose to live, live fully, passionately. Anything less would not be worth the struggle and pain of healing.

Healing requires going back and revisiting traumatic memories while the whole nervous system shouts, “No! Danger!” They don’t all have to be revisited, and perfect recall is not required, but at least a few frozen traumatic memories have to be transformed into narrative memory.

The key predictor of healing is a sense of responsibility for one’s actions. Conversely, prioritizing self-protection above responsibility acts to keep dissociative mechanisms in place. A sense of integrity, or the lack of it, shines through all the dissociative fragments of a person.

We see dramatic portrayals of Dissociative Identity Disorder in books and movies and believe it to be very rare, but most people with DID switch quietly, unnoticed, in higher numbers than we believe. Martha Stout says it is because most people aren’t such good actors, and I think people also try to camouflage switching as much as possible. She validates the anger, frustration, and bewilderment of coping with someone’s quicksilver changes and lack of memory for their own recent words and actions.

She also says that we all dissociate to some extent, whether arriving at a destination without remembering the drive, or being absorbed in a movie, or suppressing “inconvenient” emotions.

For trauma survivors she recommends:

  • Find help, a steady witness, whether a therapist or a friend.
  • Be as safe as possible in the present. Provide your nervous system with a calm environment.
  • Buy comforts, keep a pet, fall in love with silence.
  • Separate yourself from difficult, crisis-addicted, rageful, and violent people.
  • Have routines. Make them sacred. Sleep every night.
  • Meditate.
  • Keep a journal. Note your dreams.

This book is unreservedly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.