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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Profound and Poetic, January 11, 2007
This review is from: Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World (Hardcover)
Drawing from a rich and powerful history of personal and clinical experience, Dr. Richard Mollica's Healing Invisible Wounds has compiled a moving book about the healing power of the human soul, taking the reader on a fantastic journey through the complex, but often unrecognized resilient attributes of individuals whom have endured horrific pain and tragedy.
This book is by no means, however, a "self-help", or even "self-healing" textbook. Rather, this book is radically unique insofar as it cannot truly be boxed in to any particular literary genre. It is at once deeply philosophical, gracefully painting an illustration of healing as a true art form, while simultaneously noting the value of concrete and pragmatic applications of the artistic healing principles covered throughout the book. Through employing a mix of clinical vignettes, personal observations and revelations, and new scientific findings made throughout a lifetime of learning, Dr. Mollica's Healing Invisible Wounds reads much like a crazy, philosophical adventure novel calling, awakening the reader to the hidden, subtle, yet ubiquitous nature of discovery and healing entwined in this mystery we call "the human experience".
This book is a profound and poetic new psychology of healing and recovery from not only extreme violence but the tragic events of everyday life. The well-cultivated insights Dr. Mollica shares with the reader should--almost must--be openly embraced, encouraged, and activated in ourselves and our loved ones as often as humanly possible.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Courageous and Revolutionary, January 25, 2007
This review is from: Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World (Hardcover)
Dr. Paul Farmer, the subject of "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder, describes Healing Invisible Wounds as "a welcome salve in a world of want and pain." I couldn't agree more. If you're exhausted from violence, war, and fear, look it square in the eye, and Mollica will show you the previously invisible resilience of the human mind and heart.
The book provides a courageous, inspiring, and radical message of the human capacity for self-healing. Mollica reveals the intricate relationship of humiliation, depression, and violence, providing deep insight both into international headlines and into our own lives. He describes the relationship of personal- and social-healing, illuminating and artfully deconstructing their systemic obstacles and showing a middle way.
Defying genre, and far from clinical in style, the book is a philosophical inquiry into the soul of man while providing skills rooted in scientific study for both understanding and recovering from trauma. The book is as applicable to the average person that is witness to ambient violence as to the survivor of extreme violence.
I've told everyone I know about it.
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Inspiring and Disappointing, May 15, 2009
I have been an admirer of Richard Mollica ever since I heard him speak in Boston in 1987. His work with refugees and survivors of trauma is monumental and profoundly humanistic and his research contributions have improved our understanding of recovery immeasurably. So I had high expectations when I sat down to read Healing Invisible Wounds as a preparation for a course on trauma and recovery. Mollica is a skilled writer and the depth of his compassion for survivors resounds throughout this book. Unfortunately I often found the logic and evidence behind many of his conclusions to be flawed, although I feel confident that his overall thesis--that healing is a natural process and that medically-based treatment often interferes with it--is valid.
Much of the evidence Mollica presents is derived from his decades of experience with Cambodian refugees, among the most severely traumatized people in the world. Indeed, the gravity of their trauma is due not only to the horrors of the Pol Pot era but to grotesque human rights abuses they suffered while trapped on the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s and early 90s. Sadly, I found Mollica's description of Site 2 to be wildly inaccurate (I know, I was there): Contrary to his description, no one was "severely punished" for praying or writing letters and the camp did have businesses, temples and schools (Mollica says "inmates were forbidden to...go to school [p. 101]" when in fact over 77 thousand children and 10,000 adults were in school when he visited Site 2 in Oct 1988--which tells us how observant he was!). Nonetheless it was a cruel and hopeless existence for the 160,000 people who stagnated there behind barbed wire at the mercy of Thai border guards, and this is Mollica's point, that some of the worst trauma takes place after the traumatic events, and our misguided efforts to assist refugees and victims of war and violence can often make their problems worse.
Mollica describes an interesting experiment that he conducted with Cambodians in the US, intended to promote self-healing by encouraging diet, exercise and meditation. This is a superb example of the direction that trauma recovery should take, and the results are inspiring. However I had one nagging question: if self-healing is a natural process, why had these refugees not healed themselves, 20 years after Pol Pot and more than a decade after leaving the camps? Throughout the book Mollica implies that a patronizing, drug-dependent and arrogant health care system is often to blame, but he himself says that in most cases the subjects of this particular study had never received treatment. The answer is of course that "self healing" really only happens once survivors understand that it is not only possible but necessary. The subjects in Mollica's study began to heal as they realized that an active program of self-care could relieve their loneliness and depression. Self-healing may be "natural" but it doesn't happen by itself, as Mollica implies; it requires awareness and active implementation on the part of the survivor.
The chapter on interpretation of dreams was a breath of fresh air to me. I have long believed that dreams are significant in the processing of traumatic experiences, as is the act of telling the story, and Mollica's description of how and why these two phenomena are therapeutic is beautifully expounded. In particular, his prescription for how to tell the survivor story, focusing not on the horrifying details but rather on the meaning it holds for the survivor, is enlightening and useful, although hardly new (see Lennis Echterling's Crisis Intervention: Promoting Resilience and Resolution in Troubled Times). Mollica also has valuable insights on the importance of work for trauma survivors, as a means of social rehabilitation, and on the need for survivors to recover dignity in response to the humiliation many experience as part of their trauma.
As a result of this book I am now inspired to use story-telling and dream analysis in my own work with survivors, and to spread the word about self-healing and how to promote it. I believe that Mollica has made a major impact on the theory behind trauma recovery, and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.
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