Restoring Hope And Trust: An Illustrated Guide To Mastering Trauma

Understanding how childhood trauma overwhelms adult well-being is at the cornerstone of Restoring Hope and Trust: An Illustrated Guide to Mastering Trauma. Although survivors may use avoidance strategies to cope with the impact of past trauma, many find that it bubbles up anyway often following other life stressors or a new trauma. Restoring Hope and Trust discusses memories of the past, the role of the nervous system, depression, self-image, and the traumatized worldview, showing clearly how past trauma affects present-day success, happiness, and relationships. This conceptual framework empowers survivors to embark on the healing journey. Restoring Hope and Trust is a compact volume based on a ten-session course that brings old and new understanding together in the psychoeducational approach using simple language, illustrations, awareness exercises, and study questions to guide readers whether they are people on the healing journey or clinicians. Author Lisa Lewis notes the importance of learning new strategies for dealing with past trauma: Too often patients want to jump into the processing [of trauma] before they have found healthy ways of regulating their emotions. It s important to be able to talk about the emotions, but not to be overwhelmed by them. We want the details to eventually bleach out and become more like other memories of what has happened in a persons lifetime....Our goal is to rob the trauma of its power. Restoring Hope and Trust reflects the authors combined 25 years of work with groups of trauma patients at the Menninger Clinic and the Heritage Mental Health Clinic. Author Jon Allen explains: For more than a decade, we clinicians and our patients have worked together in psychoeducational groups to learn about trauma from each other. Each individual brings unique expertise to this endeavor, primarily from life experience. Based on this large pool of expertise personal and professional we have continued to refine our educational program; pe