Trauma In The Family

The Handbook of Stress, Trauma, and the Family is broken down into three sections, compiling research, theory and practice. The first section focuses on how traumatic stress affects intimate others, what familial characteristics affect individual susceptibility to trauma, as well as evaluation of the effectiveness of various interventions. The section on theory explores concepts of stress and intrapsychic processes underlying the intergenerational transmission of trauma, addressesing how families can buffer or enhance anxiety. The final section, entitled practice, covers assessment (presenting both the Circumplex Model and Bowenian family theory models), treatment models and treatment formats for specific populations. The major family treatment models applicable to stress and trauma are discussed, including contextual, object relations, emotionally focused and critical interaction therapy.

Trauma has become a hotly contested topic in literary studies. But interest in trauma is not new; its roots extend to the Romantic period, when novelists and the first psychiatrists influenced each others' investigations of the »wounded mind«. This book looks back to these early attempts to understand trauma, reading a selection of Romantic novels in dialogue with Romantic and contemporary psychiatry. It then carries that dialogue forward to postmodern fiction, examining further how empirical approaches can deepen our theorizations of trauma. Within an interdisciplinary framework, this study reveals fresh insights into the poetics, politics, and ethics of trauma fiction.

A groundbreaking approach to transforming traumatic legacies passed down in families over generations, by an acclaimed expert in the field Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood. As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.

"This book builds upon my early work and the work and others by offering a comprehensive guide to practitioners interested in facing and helping to heal trauma and manage the drama systemically with a special focus on children and adolescents. The FST Model is a contribution to the fields of trauma, family sciences, and human development practice." --Charles R. Figley, PhD; Kurzweg Chair in Disaster Mental Health at Tulane University in New Orleans This is the first book that addresses trauma treatment for child and adolescents using a Family Systems Trauma (FST) model which goes beyond individual therapy to include the child and their entire family. Co-written by a renowned family therapist who created the Parenting with Love and Limits® model, it delivers a research-based , step-by-step approach that incorporates the child’s immediate family along with their extended family to treat the traumatized child or adolescent. Using a "stress chart," the child or adolescent's trauma symptoms are quickly identified. This strategy guides therapists in accurately diagnosing root causes of the child's trauma and culminates in the creation of co-created "wound playbooks" to heal trauma in both the child as well as other family members. Additional helpful features include extensive case examples, a menu of trauma techniques, wound playbook examples, evaluation forms, client handouts, and other practical tools to provide the therapist with a complete guide to implementing this approach. Child and family therapists, social workers, mental health counselors, and psychologists working in a variety of settings will find this book a valuable resource. Key Features: Provides a step-by-step, practice focused, time-limited model Uses a family systems approach for addressing child and adolescent trauma--the only book of its kind Includes useful tools such as checklists, client handouts, and evaluation forms

Highlights the importance of the synergy between individual, family and community interventions for children's recovery from post-traumatic stress.

The new edition of the classic Helping Traumatized Families not only offers clinicians a unified, evidence-based theory of the systemic impact of traumatic stress—it also details a systematic approach to helping families heal by promoting their natural healing resources. Though the impact of trauma on a family can be growth producing, some families either struggle or fail to adapt successfully. Helping Traumatized Families guides practitioners around common pitfalls and toward a series of evidence-based strategies that they can use to help families feel empowered and ultimately to thrive by developing tools for enhancing resilience and self-regulation.

This “rare and compelling” (New York Magazine) bestseller examines childhood trauma and the enduring effects it has on an individual's management of repressed anger and pain. Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided millions of readers with an answer--and has helped them to apply it to their own lives. Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love." Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb.... Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived." But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.

Exploring the conditions under which children, as a function of their own abuse, become abusive themselves. That experiences from childhood affect our behavior in adulthood, especially in the ways we treat our children and intimate partners, is generally accepted. Indeed, theories of intergenerational transmission of violence indicate that if we ourselves have been abused and neglected as children, we will likely be abusive and neglectful to others close to us—thus extending the cycle across generations. However, many individuals who were maltreated as children do not replicate this cycle, and such models make little sense of the individual raised in a “good family” who is violent either as a child or as an adult. These discontinuities of cycles of violence and trauma have challenged professionals and nonprofessionals alike. However, broadening our vision and attending to new areas of research can help to illuminate this conundrum and open up new avenues of intervention. In this book, Pamela Alexander does just that. She proposes that an increased risk for abusive behavior or revictimization, as a function of one’s own experiences of abuse or trauma in childhood, can best be understood through the complementary lenses of attachment theory (focusing on the relationship between the child and the caregiver) and family systems theory (focusing on the larger context of this relationship). That is, what a child acquires from her relationship with a caregiver is not simply a reflection of what she has “learned” from experiencing or witnessing abuse. Rather, it emerges from the child’s felt experience of the relationship itself—on implicit emotional, physical, and neurobiological levels. Alexander founds the book on this multifaceted parent–child attachment relationship and its place in the wider family system, integrating clinical experience with close attention to the long-term neurobiological and epigenetic effects of trauma. She focuses on common outcomes of a history of maltreatment, and of child sexual abuse in particular, including peer victimization, partner violence, parenting problems, and sexual offending. A detailed review of the literature accompanies instructive case examples. Sources of trauma from outside the family, including combat exposure, political terrorism, foster care, and incarceration of parents are considered. Finally, Alexander analyzes the multiple sources of natural resilience—the neurobiological, the individual, the relational, and the social—to enable professionals of all backgrounds to tailor-make effective interventions for interrupting cycles of trauma and violence.