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Unspeakable Truths and Happy Endings: Human Cruelty and the New Trauma Therapy

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In Unspeakable Truths And Happy Endings: Human Cruelty And The New Trauma Therapy, author Rebecca Coffey offers a spirited, comprehensive discussion of the role of mental health professionals who, in an effort to help men and women traumatized by horrific circumstances and events, sometimes destroy their clients families. Yet the value of reviewing past traumatic events such as incest, physical abuse, emotional neglect, adultery, alcoholism, substance addiction, abandonment, etc., in order to make peace with the past is clearly beneficial and a proper aspect of psychological treatment. Unspeakable Truths And Happy Endings takes a nicely balanced view of the roles and limitations of telling, listening, psychotherapy, and psychotherapists in the healing process. Coffey offers a new and more enlightened understanding for psychologists, counselors, and clients that will help to insure a successful outcome to dealing with the unspeakable and be ultimately assured of improved mental health and psychological well-being.

Carefully researched and beautifully written, UnspeakableTruths and Happy Endings is perhaps the most understandable andconvincing coverage of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to appear to date. Author Rebecca Coffey transcribes vividly and in depth, and with compassion and balance, several troubling, heartrending tales of human cruelty, analyzing their consequences, placing them in context in view of the heated debate that surrounds PTSD. She has done us all a great service with her thoughtful and restrained analysis of the diverse attitudes surrounding this complex issue. With the crush of increasing population upon us, violence induced unresolved stress is rapidly becoming a "need to know" subject for all of us. It won't go away in our lifetime. I heartily recommend this book as more than an introduction. It should be required reading for survival in today's world.

The book, awarded Outstanding Academic Book award by American Library Association's Choice magazine in 1999 (See more reviews of the book at the author's website [...]), is written by a woman's voice, journalist Rebecca Coffey Rebecca Coffey. She uses a narrative approach to show why is it that trauma so often seems "unspeakable", "indescribable" to its survivors (victims). She also provides an answer that it is a response by others who were supposed to listen to the truth, which makes it "unspeakable" (even though shutting down of Broca area in the brain, which happens when survivors are reminded of trauma, doesn't help them to speak up either). In another words: "(...) this is more than the cliched 'giving victims a voice'. Coffey examines why we (the public in general, and therapists in particular) are reluctant to hear heart-wrenching stories, whether the voices are those of a Holocaust survivor, or of a mother whose two sons were murdered in separate incidents, or of a woman who was gang-raped by 27 men after being forced to watch a dog burned alive, or of a woman brutally and repeatedly raped by her father, and especially we do not want to hear the agony of Vietnam war veterans."

The subject presented by another classic written by Judith Herman, who did it in a more academic fashion Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, is approached from another angle by Rebecca Coffey as the following book reviews written by experts testify: "(...) this book is powerful! (...) Even those who read a great deal on the subject of trauma will be shaken by this book. And because of its raw honesty and integrity (...) belonging in the same category with Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery (...)

Rebecca Coffey makes her reader not only learn, but emotionally learn, i.e. re-experience the inner force which pushes everybody towards the denial and even towards our siding with perpetrators, not victims, despite all the intellectual knowledge of evidence, or better put because the unspeakable strength of the evidence.

It is a book that is not written from the victim's point of view, nor from the therapist's, but from the journalist's point of view. It is a book that has a potential of transforming a reader, silent bystander, into an articulate, compassionate, and committed witness.

The book is not for audience who read personal accounts just to feel sorry for the unfortunate people and afterwards feel a little bit more comfortable with their own life.

It is written by a journalist in a matter-of-factly style, without the author's subjective feelings. Therefore it can not be dismissed as just another victim's personal "emotional striptease", as Therapy Culture's critic Frank Furedi calls them).

It is rather for the active, not passive, audience who is doing something about it, making small changes that can transform the world into a better place, making here-and-now the world a better place for those who managed to survive all sorts of unfortunate events, because they can learn that although sometimes it just does never happen at all, nevertheless when it does it is beautiful that it does happen at all, miraculously beautiful.

This Seller provides fast professional service. The book arrived well packaged and in perfect condition. I would definitely purchase again from this vendor.