The Child Survivor

In this second edition of Joyanna Silberg’s classic The Child Survivor, practitioners who treat dissociative children will find practical tools that are backed up by recent advances in clinical research. Chapters are filled with examples of clinical dilemmas that can challenge even the most expert child trauma clinicians, and Silberg shows how to handle these dilemmas with creativity, attunement, and sensitivity to the adaptive nature of even the most complex dissociative symptoms. The new edition addresses the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on children and provides tips for working with traumatized children in telehealth. A new chapter on organized abuse explains how children victimized by even the most sadistic crimes can respond well to therapy. Clinicians on the front lines of treatment will come away from the book with an arsenal of therapeutic techniques that they can put into practice right away, limiting the need for restrictive hospitalizations or out-of-home placements for their young clients.

The Child Survivor is a practical compendium of therapeutic tools for working with children and adolescents who have been exposed to ongoing developmental trauma.

"I set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived." The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Helen Epstein traveled from America to Europe to Israel, searching for one vital thin in common: their parent's persecution by the Nazis. She found: • Gabriela Korda, who was raised by her parents as a German Protestant in South America; • Albert Singerman, who fought in the jungles of Vietnam to prove that he, too, could survive a grueling ordeal; • Deborah Schwartz, a Southern beauty queen who—at the Miss America pageant, played the same Chopin piece that was played over Polish radio during Hitler's invasion. Epstein interviewed hundreds of men and women coping with an extraordinary legacy. In each, she found shades of herself.

Special attention is paid to the effects of the Holocaust on children who were in hiding and the experience of adolescent children, as described in the diary of an adolescent girl.

Until age seven, Olga Barsony Verrall lived an idyllic life in Szarvas, a small town in Hungary, surrounded by her doting, observant Jewish family. After the Nazi invasion in 1944, Olga found herself, along with most of her family, interned in the Auspitz labour camp. Eventually reunited after the war. A long journey of physical and mental healing, along with the support of her family, helped Olga piece her life back together. For Olga, writing her memoir was a catharsis. For her readers, it will be an inspiration.

I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors distills, through text and drawings, including panels in the comic-book format, Bernice Eisenstein’s memories of her 1950s’ childhood in Toronto with her Yiddish-speaking parents, whose often unspoken experiences of war were nevertheless always present. The memories also draw on inherited fragments of stories about relatives lost to the war whom she never met. Eisenstein’s parents met in Auschwitz, near the end of the war and were married shortly after Liberation. The book began to take root in her imagination several years ago, almost a decade after her father’s death. With poignancy and searing honesty, Eisenstein explores with ineffable sadness and bittersweet humour her childhood growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. But more than a book about the Holocaust and its far-reaching shadows, this moving, visually ravishing graphic memoir speaks universally about memory, loss, and recovery of the past. No one who sees this book will not be deeply affected by its beautiful, highly evocative writing and brilliantly original and haunting artwork created by the author. I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is destined to become a classic. “I am lost in memory. It is not a place that has been mapped, fixed by coordinates of longitude and latitude, whereby I can retrace a step and come to the same place again. Each time is different. . . . “While my father was alive, I searched to find his face among those documented photographs of survivors of Auschwitz — actually, photos from any camp would do. If I could see him staring out through barbed wire, I thought I would then know how to remember him, know what he was made to become, and then possibly know what he might have been. All my life, I’ve looked for more in order to fill in the parts of my father that had gone missing. . . .” —Excerpts from I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors

I AM ME"Survivor of Child Abuse and Bullying Speaks Out" The true story about a person that chooses no longer to live as a victim but became a survivor.Do you view yourself as a victim and unaware how to overcome abuse? Do you need help conquering your demons and coming to terms with the nightmare of your past?Are you clueless on how to walk away from the individuals that hurt you and stand up for yourself?"In this book you will: "You will learn how to achieve strategies for survival and healing.Discover ways to help survivors identify and validate their childhood experience with child abuse and bullying.Identify and come to terms with your sexuality and not to hide who you really are to please others. Learn that suicide is not the way out and choosing to survive and take control of your life.Find the person you were meant to be and accept who you are and love yourself.

“Anyone who had a troubled childhood ought to read this book.”—Anne H. Cohn, D.P.H., Executive Director, National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse Do you have trouble finding friends, lovers, acquaintances? Once you find them, do they dump on you, take advantage of you, or leave? Are you in a relationship you know isn't good for you? Are you still trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up? Are you drinking too much, eating too much or trying to numb your pain with drugs of any kind? These are just a few of the problems abused children experience when they become adults. You may not realize you were abused. You may think your parents didn't mean it, didn't know better, or that others had it much worse. You may not even have made the connection between the past and your current problems. Outgrowing the Pain is an important book for any adult who was abused or neglected in childhood. It's an important book for professionals who help others. It's a book of questions that can pinpoint and illuminate destructive patterns. The answers you discover can lead to a life filled with new insight, hope, and love. “The best book available to help survivors cope and understand.”—Dan Sexton, Director, Childhelp's National Abuse Hotline “An invaluable aid for adult survivors of child abuse.”—Suzanne M. Sgroi, M.D., Executive Director, New England Clinical Associates