Customer Reviews

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

5 star:		(70)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Just read ch. 5 and you will be sold. As a person who has worked as a therapist with a variety of people and a variety of problems, I was stunned by the way that this book explains the impact of trauma. You need to read the concept of "complex ptsd," presented in ch. 6. Chs 5 and 6 elegantly present a framework for understanding people who have grown up in the fear of a terroristic household, whether with sexual abuse or not, whether with notable physical abuse or not. This framework acounts for the various problems suffered that are often described by clinicians as "borderline personality disorder," "somatization disorder," and other difficult/lets-ignore-them diagnoses. My feeling is that if you grew up in a scary, terroristic home, if you read chapter five you will believe this author was observing the whole time, and you may gain some insight into your own adult life and personality.

Was Judith watching us at home? Did she hide in the closet and take notes? You'll wonder if Judith Herman has the ability to see inside your thoughts after reading Chapter 5. As a survivor of child abuse and trauma, I was amazed by her ability to clearly define my thoughts, reactions and general "take" on life. If you are a survivor of ANY kind of trauma, READ THIS BOOK. My therapist, Dr. Zitlin in San Antonio, asked me to please read this book after one visit with him. Trauma and Recovery proves to me that recovery is actually possible. And in a way that just might work. This is like no other book I've ever read on trauma, child abuse or PTSD. I've read enough self help books to fill three hefty bags and finally I'm reading something that mirrors my own experience. It's compassion filled without losing credibility. Simply amazing. Please take the time to read this.

This is not your usual trauma recovery book. Most books on healing explain symptoms, offer exercises, and provide illuminating case histories. Judith Herman does all this, but she goes beyond just focusing on healing oneself in isolation. We are social animals, and must live within our culture. Thus, how our culture regards trauma and traumatized people is very important to those trying to become reintegrated into society after massive psychic shock. Dr. Herman explains our modern Western culture's attitudes toward trauma and the traumatized, gives a fascinating and pertinent history of how those attitudes have changed throughout the past century, and shows how those attitudes affect how survivors recover.

Dr. Herman sets forth most of this broader cultural history in Part 1, Chapter 1, "A Forgotten History." She begins with the female hysteria patients of 19th Century Europe, and ends up with the Vietnam veterans' movement to demand treatment for battle induced post-traumatic stress. The veterans' work bore fruit. In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association included "post-traumatic stress disorder" in its official manual of mental disorders. This paved the way in the 1980s for victims of rape, childhood abuse, and domestic violence to be treated for post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

Part of the history Herman sets forth explores why people tend to shun and try to silence trauma survivors. She writes, "It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering."

I would guess that most people recovering from trauma have experienced the dynamic of those around them "taking the side of the perpetrator." Without understanding why they are doing so only compounds the suffering the survivor experiences, and intensifies the feeling that one is tainted, bad, or defective for having been traumatized in the first place. In exploring the cultural dynamics of collective repression and denial, Herman does a great service to those who must heal and re-enter a culture which can sometimes be seen to be in league with the perpetrators in our world.

The remainder of Part 1 deals with the types of abuse and the symptoms which follow. This information can be found in other books, but here it is set in a larger cultural context which helps the reader to make more sense out of the symptoms.

Part 2 describes the stages of recovery. This information is very concrete, very helpful, and hopeful as well. Dr. Herman outlines three main stages: establishing safety, remembering and integrating one's story, and re-integrating oneself back into the social world.

This book is probably the most helpful book I have read on trauma recovery in 20 years. Dr. Herman's idea of exploring the social matrix in which healing occurs is brilliant. After all, we are all connected. We cannot heal ourselves without making some sort of peace with the culture around us. We cannot always change the attitudes of those around us, but we can learn to understand, and thus approach those who cannot comprehend our reality with at least some measure of forgiveness and compassion.

I wrote a glowing review on this book four years ago, but now that I have more formal education in trauma psychology I wanted to provide a more nuanced perspective.

Dr. Judith Herman is one of the most important voices in the field, and she was in fact a member of the committee that defined PTSD as it is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual - IV. Her contribution to the understanding of trauma psychology has been essential to understanding how trauma becomes PTSD and how that is manifested in the sufferer. She brings an incredible depth of compassion to her writing, making this book seem less like a compilation of research material and more like a courageous willingness to be a witness to unspeakable horror.

Dr. Herman specializes in sexual abuse and incest, but the book is meant to draw all sufferers of repeated trauma, from prisoners of war to victims of domestic violence, together under a single umbrella. She identifies what she believes to be a form of Complex-PTSD that is more pervasive and personality-oriented as a result of repeat trauma and captivity. Symptoms of this condition include an unstable sense of self, profound changes in system of meaning (such as loss of faith in God or basic goodness of humanity), sudden and unexpected changes in mood, fears of abandonment, fears of catostrophic world devastation, feelings of inherent badness, etc. In the book, Herman suggests that symptomatic overlap with Borderline Personality Disorder may indicate BPD is, in many cases, actually a form of complex trauma. While I believe there is some evidence to support this argument (such as the fact that the vast majority of those diagnosed with BPD suffer from childhood sexual trauma), her case is hardly universally accepted by the psychiatric community. Some clinicians will diagnose Complex PTSD and some will not.

One of the most interesting and useful messages of her work is the idea that the goal of treatment for the trauma survivor is to "speak the unspeakable." She emphasizes the importance of taking the shattered, incoherent pieces of the trauma and deliberately, painstakingly weaving them into a cohesive narrative. She provides evidence to suggest that traumatic memories are neurochemically stored in a different way than traditional narrative memory, and that those with PTSD are hard-wired and chemically coded to reexperience trauma when triggered.

At the time she wrote the work, evidence-based research on PTSD was in its early stages, but her words about "speaking the unspeakable" have become startlingly prescient. Everything we know about PTSD to date suggests that it is caused by avoiding reminders of the traumatic event. This is because thought-suppression usually results in those distressing thoughts and memories re-emerging at highly inconvenient times. The best way we know to treat is literally to "speak the unspeakable" --over and over -- until we learn that the monster we feared is so much smaller than we imagined. This is called prolonged exposure, and at certain clinics it is showing a treatment effectiveness rate of 80%.

Dr. Herman does not discuss prolonged exposure because AFAIK it didn't exist yet... but she was correct that the way to heal from trauma is to say that which you are sure you cannot... to do, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, "The thing you think you cannot do."

None of this is easy, and in fact, if you are a sufferer of repeated trauma, this might be one of those books you wait to read until you are in a stable place. It is compassionate, but very clinical, and seeing your psychology broken down into such concrete, analytical and frankly bleak pieces can be really unsettling. It is crucial, however, for all trauma survivors to understand that they are not alone, and the reactions they perceive as "crazy" or "bad" are in fact such typical reactions to objectively horrific events that they have been canonized into a moving and thought-provoking body of literature entitled "Trauma and Recovery." You will find, if you were a child of abuse or victim of domestic violence, that you have more in common with torture victims and prisoners of war than you ever imagined.

This book cannot heal you, but it can point in the right direction, and it will help you understand yourself.

I was amazed at how much substantial information this book contained. Initially it covers victims of trauma that are adults (rape survivors and soldiers). Then it moves into the realm of child abuse and this is where the book shines. Acknowledging that an abused child doesn't have a "me before the trauma" it goes into great detail about the life and experience of an abused child. I have never read a book that gave me so much information and hit the nail on the head so astutely. A must have for those dealing with the aftermath of trauma.

This book comes across like a textbook in places - but it is probably the most comforting and most worn book in my collection. This is a great resource for anyone who is working through Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) - or who loves someone who is. I found great comfort in her use of the research that has been done to date on this disorder. This book delves into all communities of PTSD that have been researched to date - this includes war veterans, rape victims, disaster survivors, etc. It is fascinating to see the similarities and the differences between these groups and the various manifestations of PTSD among them. It also offers some good ideas and advice for progressing through recovery.

I learned much about myself as I read this book. Well worth the cost and time to read it - I will always have it in my library - and refer to it often.

The text Trauma and Recovery is an insightful book that outlines the many horrors and ramifications of psychological and physical trauma, as well as the arduous path to partial recovery. I use the word partial because it is not only what the text itself states (211), it is what I have observed as a ministry professional. Traumatized persons lose their senses of trust and selfhood, senses that are extremely difficult to regain once they are lost. This is especially true of those who are chronically abused.
Dr. Herman begins her treatise of this topic with an historical backdrop and proceeds with a well articulated presentation of trauma as is it is commonly seen and understood by practitioners as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The various symptoms of this disorder are outlined and explained clinically and pragmatically. As the chapters unfolded, I found myself in a position where I could almost hear the screams and cries for help coming from the oppressed and abused. From my past work with war veterans in a clinical setting, I revisited many of Dr. Herman's case studies in the context of my own mind and experience. I believe that she is extremely accurate in her descriptions of PTSD in the various populations of victims.
The two major emphases of the book, trauma and recovery, are logically connected in its content. For example, on Page 133, the author states that the core experiences of trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others. Therefore, recovery seeks to empower the survivor and create new connections. It is interesting how much emphasis Dr. Herman places on relationships within the healing process. Isn't it intriguing that the corrective for abusive or traumatic relationships are wholesome relationships, and that healing can only happen within the context of these wholesome relationships?

Many might be turned off by the author's outright use of feminist pronouns when describing many of her case studies. However, being "turned off" by seeming feminist jargon is not going to be enough to discredit this deeply penetrating and important cultural work. Psychological trauma (despite trumpeted charges commanding that we see everything as "just fine") is, in my view as a student of psychology, at least 80% of the story of human civilization. This book begins with an excursion through the history of how psychiatrists first began to work with "hysterics" and continues on to describe how greater awareness of these concepts proliferated due to war veterans who exhibited a peculiar cluster of psychological symptoms. Herman continues with how awareness was spread as a result from such movements that dealt with civil and human rights. All of this information is useful and begs the question as to why studies of psychological trauma are rarely included in college undergrad curriculums for psychology. But the most meaningful and helpful aspect of this book for survivors and lay people alike is it's use of language. Rarely do we get a descriptive account(especially in the clinical arena) of the true sensorium of the traumatic event and it's aftermath. This takes a great deal of skill and devotion to do. Usually we find this in the work of underground poets or war movies that rely on graphic reality to express it's message (Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" comes to mind). The chapters are brave as they expose reality in the face of institutions and other demographics who would definitely punish such "pesky psycho-social critique." Herman is talented in being able to write about extremities without coming across as sensationalistic or melodramatic. The chapter on Child Abuse is especially helpful since, let's face it, most do not care to pursue or acknowledge the total experience of millions of children in America who are subject to brutality ranging from mere beatings with a belt to getting their skulls smashed in with hammers. Herman addresses these issues and affectively reels in the flaying, forgetful, and inattentive consciousness of those members of the masses who have a shread of compassion and intellectual insight.

I was grateful for the gift of this book. Yet, I wish that I had read it sooner. The community within which I minister is probably not unlike a lot of other communities providing care-frustrated with certain individuals that present complex and confusing symptoms. We have a tendency to diagnose some of these most frustrating cases as borderline personality disorder or even multiple personality disorder. Yet, this book has helped me to realize that many of the persons behind these diagnoses may very well be suffering from complex post traumatic syndrome. Recently, several persons I encounter in pastoral settings have in fact received these diagnoses. However, I now wonder how many of those other persons I know that are "borderline" or "multiple personality" or "bi-polar" or many other similar anxiety disorders may in reality be suffering from post traumatic stress.

This book has not only helped me to reevaluate the underlying diagnoses of many I minister to in my congregation but has also provided well-documented and well-presented pragmatic recommendations for how to assist these persons in their recoveries. As I learn the stories of persons I minister to I am increasingly aware of how common chronic traumas have been the norm for many. I will refer to this book often as I seek to better care for those traumatized by life.

I highly recommend this book to anyone that regularly deals with troubled persons. In fact, upon reading this book, I suspect that many will arrive at the same conclusion as have I-many are suffering from post traumatic events. This understanding may very well assist us to better care for those complex and difficult persons we often laugh off as "borderlines."

This was one of the first books my psychiatrist suggested I read, and I've by now given several copies to friends. My PTSD became full blown when, 9 months after my car accident I was still trying to recover from what had been a misdiagnosed broken neck. I'm fortunate to have found a skilled therapist who values Dr. Herman's work and who recognized in me signs and symptoms of older betrayals. This is an important work.