Customer Reviews

Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day--How We Are Harmed, How We Can Heal

5 star:		(5)
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3 star:		(1)
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I read this book to help me in my work as a psychotherapist and a nurse, but I found that it helped me most in the work of living-- of befriending, parenting, loving. I have now shared the book with those I work with and live with and they are sharing it with others because they agree that, as the author says, we are all affected by this- witnessing of violence- and we can all do something about it in a way that will help not only ourselves but others. Weingarten shows us how to recognize and resist the insidious effects of the culture of violence, but more importantly, she shows us how to turn it around. We can change our ways of witnessing, acting, and joining with others. Too long and too often I have felt torn between being a guilty bystander and an ineffective protester. The gift of this book is that a new way is now opened; reasonable, respectful, and healing.

This is a superb book that makes it extremely clear that witnessing violence and violation is a huge problem, not just for individuals and families, but also for communities and nations. The book covers much upsetting territory, but it gives you ways to manage it all along the way, so that you can handle what's really painful. The book combines academic rigor with touching stories, so that it is a page-turner. I was moved by the author's personal sharing, which is somewhat unusual for a scholar. I definitely felt hopeful after reading it. The book allows me, and I think it will other readers, to be much clearer about how to take care of myself and also what I could do to feel less helpless in the face of all the violence in the world. I am left with a feeling that I can make a difference.

Having heard a moving interview with Diane Rehn of NPR, I bought Dr.Weingartens book. The book lived up to and beyond my expectations. Ditto to the 2 reviews above. I'm a pastoral psychotherapist, and bought it to help me in my work. It's also helped me personally and I've recommended it to clients, patients, relatives and friends. Besides addressing everyday violence, it addresses the "shock" of chronic illness, and dying... and the potential harmful effect of not communicating in these crises, as well as insight and practical examples modeling ways to do so. There is so much sensitivity and insight in its pages, that I look forward to reading it again.

I differ somewhat from the previous reviewers in that I found this book to fall short of my expectations. I am glad to have read it; it was worth my time. The irony is that I found it to be extremely meaningful on a larger scale, but less meaningful on the smaller, everyday scale that its title promised. I'd have liked the author to provide many more tangible examples of the "common shocks" we endure on a regular basis, and more insight and direction into specifically effective ways of witnessing these shocks. She opens up the book, for instance, sharing a moving account of how she witnessed effectively the shock of seeing, with her friend's child, an abusive parental incident in public. She describes how she tried to detoxify the event for the child. This was interesting; it was an everyday "common shock," and she demonstrated a strategy for assisting the young victim. I thought the book would be about just such incidents and mini-traumas; that it would leave the reader with many more specific examples of addressing such traumas, both to oneself and others. Instead, she spends the bulk of her considerable talent addressing much wider, often international, highly political and politically violent, even genocidal traumas, moving away from what I thought would be a focus on the more inisidious, if less dramatic, shocks of everyday life. This disappointed me. In fact, you have to get to the appendixes--in which she details suggestions of effective witnessing, etc--to get the kind of information I thought the book itself was supposed to provide. I also found (and feel mean and nasty saying this) the author's continual examples of her sensitivity and unremitting goodness--i.e., her constant empathic sensibility to the sufferings of humanity-- somewhat cloying. She comes off as rather saintly, in my view, notwithstanding her warnings of the need to keep one's balance vis a vis others' suffering. Maybe I'm just a jerk, but this rubbed me the wrong way.

I read "Common Shock" when it first came out and have referred to it and recommended it often. I think Kathae Weingarten has done an excellant job of synthesizing the important components of our every day experiences of witnessing violence as she guides us into a deeper understanding of ourselves and our society. Now, with the senselessness of more mass murder in Binghamton, NY, I find myself reaching for this book again. As a family therapist myself, I will continue to recommend it to friends, family, and clients. I'm proud that a member of my profession has invested so much of herself in helping us to understand and deal with our own reactions to witnessing violence.

common shock offers a unique perspective on the jarring world we live in and enormously helpful suggestions for how to cope and manage the emotional injuries we suffer, consciously or not. weingarten has a sharp intellect and keen observational sense and is well worth reading. as a clinician and administrator in the field of mental health, i use daily what i have learned from this book.