Customer Reviews

Not Trauma Alone: Therapy for Child Abuse Survivors in Family and Social Context (Series in Trauma and Loss)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Excellent viewpoints from different angles. I read it from a 'victim in recovery' view. I identified with the entire book. It does not cover the more unusual aspect of the victim living in fear of losing his life at the hands of his mother as in my case; but does cover very fully the more usual traumas in the family context of PCB (Prolonged Child Abuse). I read it all through, then started all over again - slowly - with my yellow highlighter. It gave me confirmation and great respect of Steven Gold's immense research and practical experience in this area. One can see 'Dissociation' in action from the social family viewpoint. Definitely a good study/read for those dealing with trauma victims as survivors or those in recovery. This is reality. (We are not alone!)

This is a book you have to have. It's an `I can't put it down' book. It makes you wonder how you ever managed to work with traumatized clients without it. It makes you realise why you weren't getting anywhere, why what you were doing in therapy wasn't good enough to help clients move on from their past trauma.

Traditionally therapy with this group of clients focussed heavily on the trauma. This book takes the reader beyond that. For once a book is looking at more than just the trauma in the past as something to be dealt with. It shows the reader why difficulties today must be tackled in a different way when the client has a trauma history than with other clients. But it opens your eyes to ways to work with other clients too.

When I am asked to recommend a book for therapists with trauma clients this is the one I choose. It is the only book that helps one understand why everyday life is so difficult for such clients, something no other book does in such depth or in such a useful way. Reading this book is like waking up to what life is really like for this group of clients; you will never see a client in the same way again. Now you will know why they behave as they do, why making changes is so difficult and why what works with other client groups doesn't work so well when the client comes from an abusive or neglectful family.

Steve Gold shows clearly how incidents of abuse are set within a family context that does not provide the tools for dealing with everyday life in an effective manner. Because of the general family context in which ongoing abuse occurs, these clients have always lacked vital coping mechanisms and abilities that are usually learned during an adequate childhood. The model proposed gives one a framework to work effectively and help the client face both the fears of the past and the fears of today. It places the trauma processing within a therapy that enables the client to grow rather than staying focussed on trauma alone. It provides the reader with a model to use to effectively understand, assess and teach the vital abilities that were never taught in childhood. It opens your eyes to the context in which these clients developed all their strategies to cope, ones that do not help them now.

This is a book that mustn't be missed. It is one you will take off the shelf again and again. Whatever DSM category your client fits into, if they have problems that arose from a traumatic childhood this is the book to guide you. It is the most important book you will ever buy.

I had the pleasure to meet Dr. Gold at a conference in New York City for male survivors of CSA and was blown away by the presentation he gave. I was even more impressed by the brief discussions we had after his presentation. Dr. Gold is a therapist of rare insight, patience, dedication, and intellect (all essential traits in anyone who works with suriviors).

Not Trauma Alone is a standout work in the field of working with clients who have experience prolonged periods of childhood abuse. (And it's a tragically rare book in this area as well).

His work shows the limitations of viewing us through the lens of trauma alone. Though it's easy to grasp onto the horror of the experience of sexual abuse and see that as the lynchpin of the problems that adult survivors face, the truth is that these attacks often happen in a much broader context of a childhood marked by neglect, abandonment, fear, and powerlessness. This experience can often leave a child marked and vulnerable to the manipulations of abusers, but more importantly this kind of upbringing leaves the adult who survives struggling to adapt and feel comfortable living in a complex world.

This book is essential reading for any therapist who has clients who have suffered from significant childhood abuse, and for any survivor who is looking to gain a greater understanding of why they feel the way they do.

I have no training in therapy or psychology. I was a victim of multiple types of abuse as a child. It was always frustrating that people only "cared" about the physical and sexual abuse, when it was the emotional abuse that really hurt.

Throughout much of my life, I've felt "on the outside looking in". I think this was because I knew that I was different, but in a way that nobody with a vaguely "normal" childhood could understand. The only other people who "got it" were people who'd grown up in similarly empty, frightening, suppressive environments. Unfortunately, many of the self-help books, especially those dealing with domestic abuse, seem not to be written by fellow "inmates", instead, the authors urged me to try to recover the good mental health or happy emotional times of the past, things I simply didn't have.

Apparently "the emotional abuse", the part of my childhood that did the damage, has only been recognized as actually being "abuse" since the early 1990's, so there isn't much that's helpful for the victims. Judith Hermans "Trauma and Recovery" was a revelation: I'd only thought of myself as having had a poor childhood; I'd never viewed it as having represented "trauma".

Herman's book put me in the ballpark of what might be useful. In various other readings, I ran across an article by this book's author. The article was so on-point, so comprehending that I was grateful to find that he'd written more. Gold's book, though definitely written for the therapist, was very comforting to me. Here was somebody on the "inside" who finally "got" it, and had something intelligent to say.

I'm getting another copy of Gold's book now for my therapist. If you're a victim who feels, like I have, that you're just not "getting through", you might want to give this book a try.

As other reviewers have stated, I, who have worked as a therapist for twenty years, had a major "Aha" moment as I read this. I saw clearly that for many of my clients it was not so much what happened to them as what never happened: never having had the experience of begin welcomed into the world, cherished and guided by loving caretakers, they are more alone than most people can even imagine. No wonder some of my clients resisted the focus on specific trauma treatment, using treatment modalities that have been empirically tested and validated. This much more subtle and compassionate understanding is the next frontier in my opinion, of therapy for trauma survivors.

Webster's defines trauma as "a disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from mental or emotional stress or physical injury". In this regard, one can assume that Gold is referring to acute trauma, since even the slow strangulation of a developing child's emotional well-being could be construed as "traumatic".

Nevertheless, the book was among the best that I have read regarding the fundamental basis for emotional imbalance in adulthood. I particularly related to the fact that such patients present to therapists not necessarily with overt self-harming behaviors, but rather due to problems simply functioning as a 'normal' adult. Gold's synopsis, along with Dr. Jennifer Freyd's "Betrayal Trauma" idea, is on the right road in defining the crucial aspects of childhood maltreatment that result in long-lasting adult mental and physical health problems.

I give the book 4 instead of 5 stars for the following reasons. Although Gold correctly indicates the failure of therapies that emphasize the impact of past blatant episodes of abuse, he only alludes to the success of the "family context model" of therapy without presenting evidence from a side-by-side comparison. I further find Gold remiss in not referencing the work of John Bowlby and other attachment researchers, who pioneered the notion that "predictable nurturing" is paramount for healthy emotional development and adult functioning. Moreover, Gold could have made more of the correlative data from human studies (from orphanages in particular), and the causal data from non-human animal studies, on the impact of neglectful and isolating parenting of children on later maladaptive behaviors upon reaching adulthood.

As a graduate student in clinical psychology, I consider Dr. Steven N. Gold's textbook to be the gold standard for students and clinicians interested in working with trauma and abuse survivors. Dr. Gold's adapted Contextual Therapy Model offers a viable and comprehensive approach to treating those who experience PTSD and complex PTSD complications from trauma. And his title "Not Trauma Alone" ultimately captures the crux of his approach in that in order to most effectively help our clients, it makes more sense to conceptualize them from a larger context beyond the trauma itself. I highly recommend this book for students, professors, trauma survivors, and clinicians.

I had heard before that a person's family of origin had an impact, sometimes a big impact, on how long it took and how difficult it could be to recover from abuse. This book does a great job at explaining why and how this is true. It was written for professionals but wasn't too difficult to read and follow. If this is an idea you hadn't considered before or just wanted more information about it, this book will probably be very helpful. It was for me.

When Not Trauma Alone: Therapy for Child Abuse Survivors in Family and Social Context was first published, I quickly ordered it from my local bookstore. I had known Steve Gold as a supervisor, a dissertation committee member and a friend and I absolutely cherished him and his work. But the book sat on my shelf for over a year before I finally picked it up and read it from beginning to end. Maybe I thought I knew what Steve had to say. Indeed he was my clinical supervisor in a yearlong practicum with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse and my professor in a couple of graduate school courses. Perhaps I was thinking that my clinical conceptualization and treatment of clients, not just trauma survivors, were so greatly affected by Steve's influence that I could indeed learn no more.

How wrong I was!!! Not Trauma Alone is one of the best books I ever read. It did not read as so many mental health treatment textbooks do. Steve's insight, compassion and humor really shine through and are truly inspirational. From the title of the chapters (e.g., Alone: Growing Up in an Ineffective Family) to the specific skills taught (e.g., self-sufficient problem resolution), this book is a must-read. My reactions to the content of the book, in particular the clinical vignettes, were vast. At some points, I laughed out loud, at other times, my heart felt heavy in sorrow. But most importantly, my reactions were, "Right on Steve!!!!" and "This is why I am in this profession" and these are the kinds of mental health practitioners I am proud to say I am a part of.

I encourage everyone I know in the mental health field (and a few psychologically-minded friends who aren't) to read this incredible piece.

This book is really for professionals; I wouldn't recommend my clients read it. I appreciate the perspective it brings to an often too politicized field. In addition, Dr. Gold does an excellent job of *not* blaming but rather using the available literature and the experience at his clinic to endorse ways to help our clients *move on* from their traumatic situations & contexts into a healthier and happier life.