Customer Reviews

Finding Life Beyond Trauma: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Heal from Post-Traumatic Stress and Trauma-Related Problems (New Harbinger Self-Help Workbook)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Finding Life Beyond Trauma: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Heal
from Post-Traumatic Stress and Trauma-Related Problems" by Follette and
Pistorello provides an excellent primer on the general theoretical foundations
of ACT as well as providing specific practical guidelines for implementing
healing practices to a traumatic past. It is a concise, well written book that
will be of great value to those who have been through painful pasts and need
help in learning how to move forward. It is filled with empirically supported
data that not many self help books offer, and helps the reader learn a great
deal about the sequelae of trauma and PTSDvariables and how to deal with tragic
life experiences through acceptance and action. I love this book because it is
not an average scientific book or a predictable self help book you pull off the
shelf at the bookstore. The workbook is easy to follow and is well organized.
Each chapter offers something special and is written by two well known and respected
researchers in the field of Trauma and PTSD. This book helped me learn how many
come to terms with some major stressful and traumatic life events and learn the skills to
practice mindfulness and acceptance around these traumatic issues. In addition,
it taught me how to enhance my psychological health and nurture my well
being by learning how to let go of emotional pain-not just by getting over it
or ignoring it but by skillfully using the steps of ACT to move in the direction
of my values with the pain....the only way to eventually "overcome it." Pain is
inevitable, but suffering is not. This book helped me to see that.

Ditching the memories of unpleasant events of yesterday, last week, or last year isn't an easy task for some of us. Using this instructive and easy to follow workbook it's clear to me now that isn't the goal. Pick it up. Work through it. You'll see what I mean.

Learning to carry pain forward into a vital, meaningful life is a skill. It can be learned. And this book can help you learn it. For people suffering from the after effects of horrific or abusive experiences, it provides a guide to a new way of living that is compassionate, self-validating, realistic, and empowering.

There are now therapist manuals as well designed to help clinicians learn how to use this approach with trauma: Acceptance & Commitment Therapy for the Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Practitioner's Guide to Using Mindfulness & Acceptance Strategies

I wrote the foreword for this book -- I'm not an objective observer -- but this is the real deal and I recommend it.

Steve Hayes

I have found, in 20 years of counseling that some patients really value from a workbooks that target their issues and concerns. In my practice I seldom see someone traumatized by early childhood experiences which many books address. I need books that recognize that most psychological trauma is caused by life threatening accidents or disease, crime, natural disaster and war. For those individual who benefit from both counseling and hands-on guided journaling and reflection, I keep a few select workbooks that I have found the most faithful to evidence-based technique and exercises. This is one of the books I use in my practice because it addresses the breadth of traumas that have expanded the fields of PTSD treatment.

Having already "done" New Harbinger's DBT Skills Workbook, The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety, and Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life, as well as having encountered Follette (and Hayes) before in Guilford Press's Mindfulness & Acceptance; I cannot say I am surprised at the quality of this book.

ACT may well be on its way to overtaking DBT as the "gold standard" of psychotherapy for insurance and HMO funders. It combines the best of psychodynamic and existential platforming with behavioristic, cognitive and experiential techniques known now to produce the payoffs in neurobiological rehabilitation. Albert Ellis would have loved it. So would Aaron Beck. So would John Watson, B. F. Skinner and Edna Foa. So would Hans Selye, Joseph Wolpe and Scott LeDoux, not to mention the 14th Dalia Lama (who's very much into such stuff; read Sharon Begley).

Modern psychotherapy is no longer about laying on couches and listening to recitations of century-old theories about potty training and Oedipal fantasies. It's no longer about chilly, 50-year-old notions that the past doesn't matter. It's no longer about dealing with the effects of shock solely on the basis of our verbal representations of it. And it's no longer about medicating our aches and pains to mask them off from consciousness to the exclusion of actually doing something about them.

In 2011, it's about identifying, questioning, reframing and either revising or rejecting the ideas in our heads that make us depressed, anxious, angry, shameful, guilty, remorseful, regretful or whatever... and sitting still and =feeling= what we feel, instead of hiding from it. We've known that these were the two essentials of recovery for several decades, but we'd been stumbling towards the promised land with various "eclectic" combinations of animal training, truth-facing, critical thinking and navel (actually diaphragm) contemplation since the `60s.

Marsha Linehan, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Steven Hayes, John Teasdale and others began to sift out the nuggets in each of several methods in the late 1980s. They reached back into relative antiquity to rediscover Fritz Perls, R. D. Laing and S. N. Goenka, and marry their legacies to the sort of stuff Wayne Dyer made popular in the `70s. Only they've done so in very organized fashion dictated by the sense of direction made possible by Mike Gazzaniga, Louis Cozolino, Al Kaszniak, Jack Panksepp and the other brain mappers of the last two decades.

Some may argue, but in essence, complex post-traumatic stress disorder is a lingering imbalance of the two branches of the autonomic nervous system that causes people to be hyper-sensitive to environmental triggers like interpersonal threat, embarrassment, humiliation, hostility, abandonment, invalidation, etc., and be unable to regain their autonomic balance. They're perpetually stuck in fight, flight, freeze or (worse) freak.

Most are =very= uncomfortable, but believing as they do that their emotions are intolerable and that facing them will "kill" them, they head off into Khantzian's medication-seeking in one addictive form or another (sex, work, exercise, compulsive activity, eating, not eating, drugs, booze) looking for fast, fast, fast relief. What works in the short term drags them further into long-term despair, of course.

Combining a practical understanding of escapism and defense mechanisms with all the aforementioned, Follette and Pistorello start with a nice dose of motivational interviewing (see Miller and Rollnick) to get the reader "on board," then head off in classic workbook fashion into both cognitive and behavioral techniques bound to remind recovering alkies of AA's 4th, 10th and 11th Steps in =depth=.

As is the case with better workbooks, this one meets the patient where the patient is and allows the =patient= to dictate his own pace and path of increasing self-awareness and self-acceptance. (Okay. Carl Rogers will be happy, too.) Psychotherapy will get even better than this in a few years as the core research and trials of various methods underway at this time hit the street in the next few years, but as of right =now=, we really can afford to say, "Eureka," because this stuff =works=.

RG, Psy.D.

ACT is the best therapy I have found because it shows how you can start to live a meaningful life based on your values, not controlled by your PTSD, NOW. Instead of waiting for the PTSD to magically go away, you learn how to manage it while moving in the direction you choose, not your symptoms. It comes across mistakenly as "Just suck it up and do it," but reread the parts on compassion. It's the most realistic book on PTSD I have ever read and the most respectful of PTSD survivors' realities. The authors get what we are living with in a way no other book seems to. I know now that I am not going to do a day treatment or some fad therapy and be cured and then go out and have a life - those magic cures so many PTSD survivors seek keep failing us. PTSD doesn't have to define or control us. We can have the symptoms of PTSD and still have lives of meaning. I have an actual ACT psychologist and he's first therapist I have had in 20 years of "recovery" that has helped me. In 6 months of ACT I'd say that my PTSD symptoms are cut in half and that I feel like a person, not a diagnosis.

Love this book and have been extremely happy to find this collection of ACT therapy book at these prices. I've found it in many bookstore for considerable more money.

I found this book extremely helpful. It was the second ACT book that I read. The concept of mindfulness helped me immensely. When I discovered that the American Diabetes Association pointed out the link between type 2 diabetes and depression, I took an even greater interest in mindfulness. After about three years of research the result, I'm no longer suffering from anxiety attacks and I'm off my diabetes meds
BALANCED NATURE Naturally Curing Diabetes, Anxiety and Living Longer