Thriving After Trauma addresses readers who have experience trauma or loss due to a variety of experience – whether accident, abuse, or injury. Shari Botwin shows readers, through personal stories, how many who have experienced the worst kinds of trauma have managed to move on and thrive beyond their experiences. Often, those who live through trauma come away with feelings of shame, guilt, anger, and despair. These are common, even normal, responses in the immediate aftermath. Left unaddressed, though, those feelings may develop into substance abuse problems, eating disorders, depression, or anxiety. Learning how to move on, to pick up and live life again, takes effort and guidance. Botwin guides readers through the stories of others who have gone on to live fulfilling, happy lives, and provides tips and tools for healing and moving on. Letting go of the shame, guilt, anger and fear associated with tragic events is crucial to reclaiming a full life. Strategies such as, journaling, mindfulness, cognitive-behavioral restructuring, and healthy relationships to aid in recovery are explored and explained, so readers can adopt those strategies that work best for them. It is not the trauma itself that results in so many people developing self-destructive tendencies and life threatening illnesses. It is the lack of having a way to digest and make sense of the trauma-related feelings that can lead one to mental illness, disconnection, and in some cases, even death. Readers will learn how to live with the trauma versus how to get over the trauma, so they can move forward healthfully and mindfully.

'A week after my 50th birthday and just as our family was about to move home, something happened that changed the way I looked at life. I spoke to others about how they rebuilt their shattered worlds after very different personal traumas, emerging stronger than before. I hope our experiences, together with the latest science on resilience, will help guide all those going through tough times. This book says that it's possible not just to survive them, but to thrive. To rise.' Renowned as a much-loved and highly respected journalist and broadcaster with thirty years' experience, Sian Williams has studied the impact of acute stress for many years and is also a trained trauma assessor. In RISE, she explores the science of resilience and growth after trauma, offers advice from the experts, and learns from those who have emerged from horrific experiences, feeling changed yet stronger, with a new perspective on their life, their relationships and their work. She also documents her own path through breast cancer, with candid and unflinching honesty. Her story provides a narrative thread through a book designed to help others deal with all manner of adversity, including physical or mental ill health; loss of a loved one; abuse and post-traumatic stress. RISE is a deeply researched exploration of trauma, grief and illness, and most importantly resilience in the darkest of days. It is an inspiring and powerful piece of work, full of honesty, warmth and wisdom.

Thema Bryant-Davis examines the cultural issues that health-care professionals need to consider in caring for trauma survivors.

The prevalence of trauma permeates America’s families, and no one is immune to its impact. Natural disasters, community and institutional violence, adverse childhood experiences—these events impact the developing brains and bodies of our youth. This book for parents and educators pulls together the research on adverse childhood experiences and other traumatic events, positive psychology and resilience to provide parents and educators specific tools to help their trauma-impacted children move from surviving to thriving. Presented in an easy-to-read, conversational style, Healing the Heart uses evidence-based strategies, inspirational stories and role-playing scenarios to provide parents and educators the information and tools needed to heal the negative impact of traumatic events. With specific strategies to address diverse forms of trauma and diverse populations, this book is a must-read resource for anyone wanting to reestablish safety, increase resilience and help heal the long-term impact of trauma.

"I don't think I've ever read a book that paints such a complex and accurate landscape of what it is like to live with the legacy of trauma as this book does, while offering a comprehensive approach to healing." --from the foreword by Bessel van der Kolk A pioneering researcher gives us a new understanding of stress and trauma, as well as the tools to heal and thrive Stress is our internal response to an experience that our brain perceives as threatening or challenging. Trauma is our response to an experience in which we feel powerless or lacking agency. Until now, researchers have treated these conditions as different, but they actually lie along a continuum. Dr. Elizabeth Stanley explains the significance of this continuum, how it affects our resilience in the face of challenge, and why an event that's stressful for one person can be traumatizing for another. This groundbreaking book examines the cultural norms that impede resilience in America, especially our collective tendency to disconnect stress from its potentially extreme consequences and override our need to recover. It explains the science of how to direct our attention to perform under stress and recover from trauma. With training, we can access agency, even in extreme-stress environments. In fact, any maladaptive behavior or response conditioned through stress or trauma can, with intentionality and understanding, be reconditioned and healed. The key is to use strategies that access not just the thinking brain but also the survival brain. By directing our attention in particular ways, we can widen the window within which our thinking brain and survival brain work together cooperatively. When we use awareness to regulate our biology this way, we can access our best, uniquely human qualities: our compassion, courage, curiosity, creativity, and connection with others. By building our resilience, we can train ourselves to make wise decisions and access choice--even during times of incredible stress, uncertainty, and change. With stories from men and women Dr. Stanley has trained in settings as varied as military bases, healthcare facilities, and Capitol Hill, as well as her own striking experiences with stress and trauma, she gives readers hands-on strategies they can use themselves, whether they want to perform under pressure or heal from traumatic experience, while at the same time pointing our understanding in a new direction.

When you turn a crisis or even a trauma into a learning moment, it will turn fear into courage and then determination. This leadership roadmap shows you the way to successfully navigating through crisis or trauma and coming out stronger on the other side. Organizational trauma takes many forms. It could be a pandemic that disrupts the way people work. An economic meltdown. An act of violence. A failed merger. A layoff—or continual threats of one. Whatever the scenario, events like these can traumatize leaders and employees, sending everyone into survival mode. Here’s the good news: when leaders navigate a traumatic event effectively, the organization doesn’t just survive. In Trauma to Triumph, Mark Goulston, MD, and Diana Hendel present a visionary and tactical roadmap to help leaders create stability amid chaos and uncertainty, move productively through a traumatic event, and flourish in ways previously unimagined. After reading this book, readers will learn: How the survival mechanism manifests in employees and leaders amid trauma The predictable polarities, dilemmas, tensions and other patterns that emerge in traumatized organizations…and how to break these cycles Why lack of clarity in roles and poor communication are dangerous in times of crisis (and how to avoid these common pitfalls) How leaders can shift to a mindset that helps create trust, confidence, safety, respect, and inspiration in employees Best practices for leading yourself and others through crisis; grieving losses, embracing healthy coping mechanisms, reframing, and more How to launch a rapid-response process where you “control the controllables” and create a framework for making better decisions during a crisis High-impact tactics to help your organization recover and heal in a way that doesn’t just return to baseline, but transcends it Filled with tools and tactics, Trauma to Triumph is an organization-wide blueprint for navigating a future where we’ll likely experience one trauma or crisis after another. It gives leaders at every level the guidance to create confidence, courage, and enthusiasm in their team.

Your struggle may come in different forms, and be given one of many different names, such as anxiety, depression, addiction, and/or PTSD. No matter how much you or a loved one is struggling, or what it is called, one thing is almost certainly clear: you aren't living the life you desire or deserve. Still, there is hope. By embracing the struggle, rather than fighting it, you can stop surviving and start thriving. Ken Falke and Josh Goldberg train combat veterans battling PTSD to understand and achieve Posttraumatic Growth (PTG). PTG helps you discover opportunities from times of struggle, and this book provides actionable strategies for making peace with past experiences, living in the present, and planning for a great future. Through Ken and Josh's work, thousands have transformed struggle into profound strength and lifelong growth. Now it is your turn. It's time to learn to Struggle Well.

Resiliency-focused approaches to managing trauma. This is a book to help clients to transform what happened to them to make them better instead of bitter. The first book on trauma to combine the theory and practice of positive psychology and solution-focused brief therapy with traditional approaches, this book veers away from a focus on pathology (what is wrong with clients and how to repair the worst) to a focus on what is right with them (and how to create the best)—that is, from post traumatic stress to post traumatic success. The three R’s of post traumatic success are: Recovery, Resilience and enRichment (post traumatic growth) - concepts depicted by the bamboo plant on the book’s cover. Trauma professionals will learn what it takes to help more survivors benefit more substantively from therapy and how to support their clients in developing longer-term resilience. By practicing the skills in this book, they can increase their clients’ self-efficacy and self-esteem, and make psychotherapy shorter in time, more cost effective and more lighthearted for their clients and themselves. Written for all professionals and students working with trauma survivors (both adults and children) and their families and friends, it equips readers with practical direction for adopting a more positive approach and expanding their range of available techniques. Over a hundred exercises, thirty-three cases, and forty stories are presented to illustrate and help incorporate this new approach into practice. It’s about time to turn the tide on treating trauma by shifting the focus from reducing distress and merely surviving to building success and positively thriving.

"This unique, user-friendly, and practical guide to understanding and healing the origins and effects of trauma is a comprehensive source of essential information and helpful advice and provides valuable, innovative tools to assist in addressing and working through anxiety, depression, and PTSD, as well as other trauma-related health challenges. Author Beth Shaw offers essential information and easy implementation of scientifically-proven techniques for self-care and new habits for daily living, exploring a variety of modalitites, including yoga, meditation, breathing exercises, and Ayurveda"--

"How could something that happened so long ago affect me today?" I asked my therapist right after she told me I was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). How could an assault at six years old be the defining factor in my adult existence? And with those questions, my life's trajectory changed. I began to search for answers. This is the story of that journey. A journey that took me deep into past traumas to face memories I'd tried to bury my whole life. A journey that revealed how my trauma was not mine alone but was connected to my parents' and grandparents' traumas. A journey that showed me how this transgenerational trauma had controlled my thoughts, my choices, and my life. And how it now infected my children's lives as well. This is a story of how I finally broke the cycle of transgenerational trauma and found healing-not only for me but for my children. And now, I share that healing with you. I invite you to travel along with me, practice the exercises at the end of each chapter, and begin your own healing journey from surviving to thriving.