Customer Reviews

The Body Remembers Casebook: Unifying Methods and Models in the Treatment of Trauma and PTSD

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This book is refreshing, well written and easy to read - it is full of sound common sense (something often lacking these days!) It stands on its own or can be read as a useful adjunct to Babette's earlier excellent book on the psychophysiology of trauma. Babette's wisdom, style and honesty around the many different approaches and tools for working with trauma are covered extensively and most usefully as fascinating case studies. I especially appreciated the chapter on learning from our mistakes and failures and the surprising fact that clients respect honest ignorance and they often don't get enough of it in the therapeutic encounter. Adaptability is the key word here..that is adapting to the unique needs of each client.
Babette's view and one which I wholeheartedly share is that there is nothing we can categorically say works for sure in treating trauma and certainly no one treatment method that works for everybody. The main emphasis is on the necessity to create safety both inside and outside the treatment room. This opens up the field for lots of further debate. Fantastic stuff.

Babette Rothschild presents a refreshingly common-sensical concept- that you should not be wedded to any one theory of how to treat PTSD. She has developed many somatic-based techniques, but she also demonstrates effective use of Transactional Analysis, Attachment Theory, Peter Levine's use of felt-sense and many others. She shares partial transcripts of sessions. Rothschild suggests that you hypothesize what will be most healing to a patient and, if that does not work, try something else. I like her idea of transparency, to tell the patient that together you will keep working until you find the key approach to unlocking his frozen energy. Catherine Mendoza LPC

In this text, Rothschild offers a beautiful piece of writing that nicely complements her earlier work, "The Body Remembers." I have found in my journey of learning to understand and work with trauma that I have had a lot of exposure to articles and textbooks, and complementary direct experience with clients to learn from. The Casebook occupies a liminal-like space in between the learning experience of a session and a textbook.

"The Body Remembers Casebook" to my mind hits a home a run for delivering a powerful yet simple presentation of various ways to work with individuals with trauma. As a novice clinician, I found the material refreshingly accessible--clear, straightforward, and communicates the core concepts of trauma work.

The first three chapters lays out a framework for understanding trauma, outlining principles for working with trauma, and describes the various modalities referred to later in the text. The rest of the book is a series of partial session transcript based chapters with author commentary. Each chapter has a theme that the session emphasizes and lists which modalities are drawn from by the therapist/author.

Enjoy...and onward we go!

I liked her annotations of rationale for interventions, helped me understand the brain stuff better, very helpful for a practitioner. I am so glad to see non-retraumatization-safety as a primary focus. I would have like more reference to Bodynamics interventions, but she did a good job of pasting them on older theories and practices, making them much more kind and healing.

The Body Remembers Casebook clearly articulates how traumatised people can be relieved from the mental torment of the trauma they have suffered. Trauma patients themselves could use this book to ease their own trauma in cases where going to a therapist might in itself be traumatic eg if their trauma was sexual assault within a counselling environment.

This book is a must read for anyone who counsels abuse victims. It is written in an easy to read and understandable format. As a healed victim and a current counselor-in-training, I found it a realistic and appropriate approach to addressing the pain and trauma of sbuse. I was conforted by the wisdom of the author as I sat in on the sessions with the clients. This book is a handy resource tool to keep at your fingertips.

This book is packed with quality information, easy and quick to read, I highly recommend to novice and professional alike.

I havent read anything like it before. I am really impressed with the methods and techniques used to solve trauma. Very, very interesting, would recommend to all.