A Shining Affliction

"Soars into sublime meditation...what makes this book so extraordinary is her willingness to reveal exactly what goes on in the sometimes mysterious encounter between therapist and patient."—The Los Angeles Times. A moving account of a true-life double healing through psychotherapy. In this brave, iconoclastic, and utterly unique book, psychotherapist Annie Rogers chronicles her remarkable bond with Ben, a severely disturbed five-ear-old. Orphaned, fostered, neglected, and forgotten in a household fire, Ben finally begins to respond to Annie in their intricate and revealing platy therapy. But as Ben begins to explore the trauma of his past, Annie finds herself being drawn downward into her own mental anguish. Catastrophically failed by her own therapist, she is hospitalized with a breakdown that renders her unable to speak. Then she and her gifted new analyst must uncover where her story of childhood terror overlaps with Ben's, and learn how she can complete her work with the child by creating a new story from the old—one that ultimately heals them both.

"Soars into sublime meditation...what makes this book so extraordinary is her willingness to reveal exactly what goes on in the sometimes mysterious encounter between therapist and patient."—The Los Angeles Times. A moving account of a true-life double healing through psychotherapy. In this brave, iconoclastic, and utterly unique book, psychotherapist Annie Rogers chronicles her remarkable bond with Ben, a severely disturbed five-ear-old. Orphaned, fostered, neglected, and forgotten in a household fire, Ben finally begins to respond to Annie in their intricate and revealing platy therapy. But as Ben begins to explore the trauma of his past, Annie finds herself being drawn downward into her own mental anguish. Catastrophically failed by her own therapist, she is hospitalized with a breakdown that renders her unable to speak. Then she and her gifted new analyst must uncover where her story of childhood terror overlaps with Ben's, and learn how she can complete her work with the child by creating a new story from the old—one that ultimately heals them both.

In her twenty years as a clinical psychologist, Annie Rogers has learned to understand the silent language of girls who will not–who cannot–speak about devastating sexual trauma. Abuse too painful to put into words does have a language, though, a language of coded signs and symptoms that conventional therapy fails to understand. In this luminous, deeply moving book, Rogers reveals how she has helped many girls find expression and healing for the sexual trauma that has shattered their childhoods. Rogers opens with a harrowing account of her own emotional collapse in childhood and goes on to illustrate its significance to how she hears and understands trauma in her clinical work. Years after her breakdown, when she discovered the brilliant work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Rogers at last had the key she needed to unlock the secrets of the unsayable. With Lacan’s theory of language and its layered associations as her guide, Rogers was able to make startling connections with seemingly unreachable girls who had lost years of childhood, who had endured the unspeakable in silence. At the heart of the book is the searing portrait of the girl Rogers calls Ellen, brutally abused for three years by her teenage male babysitter. Over the course of seven years of therapy, Rogers helped Ellen find words for the terrible things that had happened to her, face up to the unconscious patterns through which she replayed the trauma, and learn to live beyond the shadows of the past. Through Ellen’s story, Rogers illuminates the complex, intimate unraveling of trauma between therapist and child, as painful truths and their consequences come to light in unexpected ways. Like Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery and Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, The Unsayable is a book with the power to change the way we think about suffering and self-expression. For those who have experienced psychological trauma, and for those who yearn to help, this brave, compelling book will be a touchstone of lucid understanding and true healing.

This book explores psychosis as knowledge cut off from history, truth that cannot be articulated in any other form. It gives a nuanced picture of delusion as a repair of language itself, following Freud and Lacan in historic and contemporary forms of psychotic art, writing and speech.

"The relational and the developmental point of view have never been brought together in an adequate way. This up-to-date scholarly, yet practical, integration opens a new vista within relational psychoanalysis and pioneers a fresh approach in the psychoanalytic treatment of children and adolescents. It is a work of great and lasting value to the field." —Peter Fonagy Child therapists practicing today are faced with the challenge of developing a coherent theory and technique while drawing on a number of diverse traditions as disparate as psychoanalysis, behavior therapy, and family systems theory. This diversity presents child therapists with a rich background, but it also presents a formidable complexity to be integrated into their therapeutic work. This book develops such an integration, offering a complete overview of issues currently being addressed by clinicians and theoreticians, and exploring various relational models and their implications for treatment. The authors bring to light the critical issues of clinical practice with children and offer powerful new models for child psychotherapists. The problems and strategies for approaching the clinical relationship between child and therapist, as well as that between parent and therapist, are examined in depth. The authors also explore the clinical setting versus the role of the therapist in the extra-clinical context of a child’s life, the therapeutic aspects of play, and the unique behaviors of children manifested in the therapeutic environment.

In unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, and yet our culture offers us no clear way to choose. This predicament seems inevitable, but in fact it’s quite new. In medieval Europe, God’s calling was a grounding force. In ancient Greece, a whole pantheon of shining gods stood ready to draw an appropriate action out of you. Like an athlete in “the zone,” you were called to a harmonious attunement with the world, so absorbed in it that you couldn’t make a “wrong” choice. If our culture no longer takes for granted a belief in God, can we nevertheless get in touch with the Homeric moods of wonder and gratitude, and be guided by the meanings they reveal? All Things Shining says we can. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly illuminate some of the greatest works of the West to reveal how we have lost our passionate engagement with and responsiveness to the world. Their journey takes us from the wonder and openness of Homer’s polytheism to the monotheism of Dante; from the autonomy of Kant to the multiple worlds of Melville; and, finally, to the spiritual difficulties evoked by modern authors such as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Gilbert. Dreyfus, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, for forty years, is an original thinker who finds in the classic texts of our culture a new relevance for people’s everyday lives. His lively, thought-provoking lectures have earned him a podcast audience that often reaches the iTunesU Top 40. Kelly, chair of the philosophy department at Harvard University, is an eloquent new voice whose sensitivity to the sadness of the culture—and to what remains of the wonder and gratitude that could chase it away—captures a generation adrift. Re-envisioning modern spiritual life through their examination of literature, philosophy, and religious testimony, Dreyfus and Kelly unearth ancient sources of meaning, and teach us how to rediscover the sacred, shining things that surround us every day. This book will change the way we understand our culture, our history, our sacred practices, and ourselves. It offers a new—and very old—way to celebrate and be grateful for our existence in the modern world.

WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER GOLD MEDAL WINNER OF THE 2016 INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER BOOK AWARDS ("IPPY”) Lene Fogelberg is dying—she is sure of it—but no doctor in Sweden, her home country, believes her. Love stories enfold her, with her husband, her two precious daughters, her enchanting surroundings, but the question she has carried in her heart since childhood—Will I die young?—is threatening all she holds dear, even her sanity. When her young family moves to the US, an answer, a diagnosis, is finally found: she is in the last stages of a fatal congenital heart disease. But is it too late? A young woman risks everything to save her own life in this “unusual, riveting medical drama crafted with deep emotion and exquisite detail” (BookPage).

Nonverbal interactions are applied to trauma treatment for more effective results. The model of treatment developed here is grounded in the physical, psychological, and cognitive reactions children have to traumatic experiences and the consequences of those experiences. The approach to treatment utilizes the integrative capacity of the brain to create a self, foster insight, and produce change. Treatment strategies are based on cutting-edge understanding of neurobiology, the development of the brain, and the storage and retrieval of traumatic memory. Case vignettes illustrate specific examples of the reactions of children, families, and teens to acute and repeated exposure to traumatic events. Also presented is the most recent knowledge of the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in development and therapy. Right brain communication, and how to recognize the non-verbal symbolic and unconscious, affective processes will be explained, along with examples of how the therapist can utilize art making, media, tools, and self to engage in a two-person biology.