Discovering the Religious Dimension of Trauma


Book Description

This book reads the Joseph novella alongside contemporary trauma novels to reveal a story written by people trying to reconstruct their assumptive world after the shattering of their old one. It also highlights the religious dimension in trauma theory.




God is a Trauma


Book Description

"It will not be easy at first to sense that God is a trauma, that 'the jungle fire-fight, the early morning rape, the speeding automobile of the drunk driver...may be God images if, like God, they create us in their image, after their likeness.' But little by little, this 'gnostic analysis' gets under the skin, & one begins to see, indeed, that 'whatever traumatises us becomes our parent' & our God, & that our religion has traumatised us by being 'religious kitsch,' covering our hurts. Greg Mogenson makes the point sensitively, therapeutically, & compellingly that 'the notion of salvation is eternally corruptible,' & that 'we need salvation from the very notion of salvation itself.' It may be as important for souls today to wrestle God as a Trauma as it was for Jacob to wrestle God's angel traumatically...& for the same reason!"--David L. Miller.




Exploring Desire and Intimacy


Book Description

This integrative book is like having a wise supervisor in the room with you. Stop "fixing" your clients--engage them in their own healing through the Four-Dimensional Wheel of Sexual Experience. Gina Ogden guides you in helping your clients explore the full range of their sexual issues and challenges—including couple communication, erectile dysfunction, vaginismus, low desire, affairs, trauma, religious proscriptions, pornography use, and more. Part I offers strategies that correspond to the core knowledge areas required for certification as a sexuality professional, while Part II puts these innovative approaches into action through following five case examples from seasoned practitioners. The numerous user-friendly elements, such as quizzes, worksheets, and "hot tips," will help you see the larger picture of an issue, become fluent with a diversity of sexual identities and behaviors, and expand your ability to offer safe, ethical, evidence-based therapy.




Integrating Spirituality into Multicultural Counseling


Book Description

Fukuyama and Sevig have compiled a significant volume that underscores the importance of counselors addressing clients′ spiritual values and experiences in the context of providing culturally-competent services. . . .One of the primary strengths of this book is that it is reader-friendly as the authors are quite skillful in blending scholarly and personal perspectives throughout. I would highly recommend this book to counselors, supervisors, academicians, researchers, and students who wish to expand their understanding of the impact of spiritual issues in the lives of culturally-diverse clients.- -Madonna G. Constantine, Columbia University "Finally! A book that examines the interface between spirituality and multiculturalism. Mary Fukuyama and Todd Sevig have created a timely masterpiece that provides a holistic view of multiculturalism, one that integrates spirituality into its fabric. The authors appropriately cover less known spiritual paths, such as Native American and Afrocentric perspectives. The chapter on developmental models of the spiritual journey is especially useful to counselors and other helping professionals. The authors also tackle the challenging question of positive and negative expressions of spirituality. The self awareness questions in each chapter prompt readers to examine their own spiritual and multicultural experiences and beliefs. Numerous case examples stimulate helping professionals to grapple with realistic and multifaceted issues that their client′s face. The integration of materials from diverse spiritual and multicultural perspectives makes this book a unique reference for anyone who is interested in this topic. As Fukuyama and Sevig note, spirituality is highly subjective and dynamic; their goal is to identify and explore good questions rather than propose definitive answers, The authors have succeeded in their goal. I highly recommend their book to counselors and all helping professionals; for all counseling is multicultural, and spirituality is an essential component of the human experience." —Pamela Highlen, Ohio State University In today′s world, multicultural contact and the search for meaning go hand in hand. This book provides an overview of spiritual and multicultural processes that will challenge and energize professionals who desire to engage in the complexities of the postmodern world. The authors propose that integrating spiritual values into multicultural learning and exploring spirituality from multicultural perspectives are synergistic and mutually reciprocal processes. Chapter topics include understanding multicultural worldviews and developmental models of the spiritual journey, integrating spiritual and multicultural competencies, clarifying healthy and unhealthy expressions of spirituality, exploring spiritual issues expressed through pain and loss as well as needs for power and creativity. Understanding counseling process issues including ethical concerns, and integrating spiritual interventions into one′s own counseling style.




Life after Death Row


Book Description

Life after Death Row examines the post-incarceration struggles of individuals who have been wrongly convicted of capital crimes, sentenced to death, and subsequently exonerated. Saundra D. Westervelt and Kimberly J. Cook present eighteen exonerees’ stories, focusing on three central areas: the invisibility of the innocent after release, the complicity of the justice system in that invisibility, and personal trauma management. Contrary to popular belief, exonerees are not automatically compensated by the state or provided adequate assistance in the transition to post-prison life. With no time and little support, many struggle to find homes, financial security, and community. They have limited or obsolete employment skills and difficulty managing such daily tasks as grocery shopping or banking. They struggle to regain independence, self-sufficiency, and identity. Drawing upon research on trauma, recovery, coping, and stigma, the authors weave a nuanced fabric of grief, loss, resilience, hope, and meaning to provide the richest account to date of the struggles faced by people striving to reclaim their lives after years of wrongful incarceration.




Survivor Criminology


Book Description

Survivor Criminology: A Radical Act of Hope is a trauma-informed approach to the study of crime and justice that stems from the lived experiences of crime survivors. The chapters within this volume explore our authors’ who have each had close personal encounters with violence and death, as well as institutionalized oppressions based on racism, heterosexism, sexism, and poverty. As scholars, professors, practitioners, and students in the field, these lived experiences with crime and criminal justice have shaped their research, teaching, and advocacy work. Their voices represent experiences that are intersectional, mult-igenerational, global, trauma-informed and resiliency focused. They are deliberately and decidedly anti-racist, and their experiences acknowledge the harm that has resulted from institutionalized and structural trauma. Most importantly, their stories are grounded in their lived experiences. This volume offers survivor criminology as a radical act of hope. Our hope comes from the belief that a trauma-centered approach to crime, justice, and healing provides the opportunity for criminology to expand its theoretical and methodological roots. We see this work as transformative for the discipline - for students, scholars, members of the community, and policy-makers.




Trauma & Evil


Book Description

This book enables caregivers working with victims of abuse and violence to add to their knowledge base an understanding of evil and how it works to destroy. Arguing that Rthe worst forms of trauma are the human intentional type", or trauma perpetrated consciously and intentionally by one human being on another, the authors define radical evil, symbolized by Satan, as trauma-inducing acts that are engaged in consciously, for its own sake, in an unapologetic way.




Ending Terrorism in Italy


Book Description

Ending Terrorism in Italy analyses processes of disengagement from terrorism, as well as the connected issues of reconciliation, truth and justice. It examines in a critical and original way how terrorism came to an end in Italy (Part I), and the legacy it has left behind (Part II). The book interrogates a wide array of published memoirs and a considerable number of new face-to-face interviews with both former terrorists and first and second generation victims In the last two decades, and especially in recent years, former extreme-right terrorists in Italy have started to talk about their past involvement in terrorist violence, including, for the first time, acts of violence which have for decades been considered taboo, that is to say, bomb attacks against innocent civilians. These narratives add to the perspectives offered by members of left-wing terrorist groups, such as the Red Brigades and Prima Linea. Surprisingly, these narratives have not been systematically examined, yet they form a unique and extremely rich source of first-hand testimony, providing invaluable insights into processes of youth radicalization and de-radicalization, the social re-integration of ex-terrorists, as well as personal and collective healing. Even less attention has been paid to the victims’ narratives or stories. Indeed, the views and activities of the victims and their associations have been seriously neglected in the scholarly literature on terrorism, not just in Italy, but elsewhere in Europe. The book therefore examines the perspectives of the victims and relatives of victims of terrorism, who over the years have formed dedicated associations and campaigned relentlessly to obtain justice through the courts, with little or no support from the state and, especially in the case of the bombing massacres, with increasing awareness that the state played a role in thwarting the course of justice. Ending Terrorism in Italy will be of interest to historians, social scientists and policy makers as well as students of political violence and post-conflict resolution. .




The Body Keeps the Score


Book Description

Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.




The Inner World of Trauma


Book Description

Donald Kalsched explores the interior world of dream and fantasy images encountered in therapy with people who have suffered unbearable life experiences. He shows how, in an ironical twist of psychical life, the very images which are generated to defend the self can become malevolent and destructive, resulting in further trauma for the person. Why and how this happens are the questions the book sets out to answer. Drawing on detailed clinical material, the author gives special attention to the problems of addiction and psychosomatic disorder, as well as the broad topic of dissociation and its treatment. By focusing on the archaic and primitive defenses of the self he connects Jungian theory and practice with contemporary object relations theory and dissociation theory. At the same time, he shows how a Jungian understanding of the universal images of myth and folklore can illuminate treatment of the traumatised patient. Trauma is about the rupture of those developmental transitions that make life worth living. Donald Kalsched sees this as a spiritual problem as well as a psychological one and in The Inner World of Trauma he provides a compelling insight into how an inner self-care system tries to save the personal spirit.