The Trauma Story is at the heart of the medical and mental health care of persons who have survived violence. Over the past 30 years the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma (HPRT) has cared for over 10,000 sufferers of extreme violence. HPRT through its scientific research has discovered the four major dimensions of the Trauma Story: 1) The "brutal" facts. 2) Cultural meaning of trauma. 3) Revelation. 4) Listener-Storyteller relationship that exist in all trauma narratives. The importance of the Trauma Story as an element of "self-healing" has also been revealed. The TSAT is a new journal approach for eliciting the trauma story and building on the survivor's resiliency. The TSAT allows the listener to enter into an empathic dialog and discover their implications of their story for healing. This approach emerged from the new book Healing Invisible Wounds: Path to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World. The TSAT can be used by all health care and mental health practitioners.

This work offers an overview of trauma theory’s relations to biblical studies. In addition to summarizing the theoretical landscape(s), it provides exegetical forays into Ezekiel and, in part, Exodus and the Eucharist. The analysis will engage these materials’ traumatic ethoi, including their connections to trauma informed eating and queerings, so as to offer entryways into the wider critical conversation. While these exegetical foci may seem arbitrary, that is in part the point. As readers will see, trauma defies sense-making. Akin to postmodernist poststructuralist intertextualities, trauma cannot be flattened into neat narration. Trauma is capricious, leaving survivors to carry with them multivalent and even paradoxical connections to their experiences. This project thus attempts to perform trauma’s plurisignification as much as it tries to explain it, using a set of traditionally unexamined pairings to do so. While not an exhaustive survey on trauma theory and the Bible - such work could fill the space of multiple publications - the following work provides a representation of both the theory of trauma and its applications within the biblical field.

This wide-ranging, thoughtful, practice-based book provides clear explanations about how to use narrative ideas to respond to people who have endured traumatic experience. Key themes include ways of ensuring that people are not re-traumatised during counselling; 'double listening' - listening not only to the story of trauma, but also to how the person has responded to what they endured; new approaches to 'trauma de-briefing'; and ways to acknowledge the values, skills, and knowledge of those who have experienced multiple traumas.We hope these stories of inspiring work from Australia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Israel, and South Africa will lead to continuing creativity in your work.

Traumatic experiences and their consequences are often the core of life stories told by survivors of violence. In Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors leading academics explore the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness that have caused trauma, the ways in which survivors remember, and the representation of these memories in the language and form of their life stories.International case studies include the migration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, the life stories of Guatemalan war widows, violence in South Africa, persecution of political prisoners in South Africa and the former Czechoslovakia, lynching in the Mississippi Delta, resistance in Zimbabwe's liberation war, sexual abuse, and the ongoing Irish troubles. The volume reveals the complexity of remembering and forgetting traumatic experiences, and shows that survivors are likely to express themselves in stories containing elements that are imaginary, fragmented, and loaded with symbolism. Trauma: Life Stories of Survivors is a groundbreaking work of relevance across the social sciences. This new perspective on trauma will be of particular importance to researchers in psychology, history, women's studies, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.

A unique self-care strategy for therapists and helping professionals. Providing therapeutic help to someone who has suffered trauma puts the therapist at risk for vicarious traumatization. It can leave the therapist with symptoms of either an acute or a posttraumatic stress response. Therapists are story listeners. One of the primary benefits a therapist provides clients is a safe place to tell their stories and to express their pain, thus diminishing their burden. This often leaves the therapist sharing the burden and the pain. Ms. Collins and Ms. Laughlin have created a process of self-care that helps prevent and alleviate vicarious traumatization. Through the process of story-telling and hearing others' stories, therapists can be relieved of the trauma they have absorbed.

In this volume leading academics explore the relationship between the experiences of terror and helplessness, the way in which survivors remember and the representation of these memories in the language and form of their life stories.

Using Trauma-Focused Therapy Stories is a groundbreaking treatment resource for trauma-informed therapists who work with abused and neglected children ages nine years and older as well as their caregivers. The therapy stories are perfect accompaniments to evidence-based treatment approaches and provide the foundation for psychoeducation and intervention with the older elementary-aged child or early pre-teen. Therapists will also benefit from the inclusion of thorough guides for children and caregivers, which illustrate trauma and developmental concepts in easy-to-understand terms. The psychoeducational material in the guides, written at a third- to fourth-grade reading level, may be used within any trauma-informed therapy model in the therapy office or sent-home for follow-up. Each therapy story illustrates trauma concepts, guides trauma narrative and cognitive restructuring work, and illuminates caregiver blind spots; the caregiver stories target issues that often become barriers to family trauma recovery. No therapist who works with young trauma survivors will want to be without this book, and school-based professionals, social workers, psychologists and others committed to working with traumatized children will find the book chock-full of game-changing ideas for their practice.

A seasoned writer and teacher of memoir explores both the difficulties inherent in writing about personal trauma and the techniques for doing so in a compelling way. Since 2013, David Chrisinger has taught military veterans, their families, and other trauma survivors how to make sense of and recount their stories of loss and transformation. The lessons he imparts can be used by anyone who has ever experienced trauma, particularly people with a deep need to share that experience in a way that leads to connection and understanding. In Stories Are What Save Us, Chrisinger shows—through writing exercises, memoir excerpts, and lessons he's learned from his students—the most efficient ways to uncover and effectively communicate what you've learned while fighting your life's battles, whatever they may be. Chrisinger explores both the difficulties inherent in writing about personal trauma and the techniques for doing so in a compelling way. Weaving together his journey as a writer, editor, and teacher, he reveals his own deeply personal story of family trauma and abuse and explains how his life has informed his writing. Part craft guide, part memoir, and part teacher's handbook, Stories Are What Save Us presents readers with a wide range of craft tools and storytelling structures that Chrisinger and his students have used to process conflict in their own lives, creating beautiful stories of growth and transformation. Throughout, this profoundly moving, laser-focused book exemplifies the very lessons it strives to teach. A foreword by former soldier and memoirist Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country, and an afterword by military wife and memoirist Angela Ricketts, author of No Man's War: Irreverent Confessions of an Infantry Wife, bookend the volume.

Using Trauma-Focused Therapy Stories is a groundbreaking treatment resource for trauma-informed therapists who work with abused and neglected children ages nine years and older as well as their caregivers. The classic edition includes a new preface from the author reflecting on changes in the field since the book’s initial publication. The therapy stories are perfect accompaniments to evidence-based treatment approaches and provide the foundation for psychoeducation and intervention with the older elementary-aged child or early pre-teen. Therapists will also benefit from the inclusion of thorough guides for children and caregivers, which illustrate trauma and developmental concepts in easy-to-understand terms. The psychoeducational material in the guides, written at a third- to fourth-grade reading level, may be used within any trauma-informed therapy model in the therapy office or sent-home for follow-up. Each therapy story illustrates trauma concepts, guides trauma narrative and cognitive restructuring work, and illuminates caregiver blind spots; the caregiver stories target issues that often become barriers to family trauma recovery. No therapist who works with young trauma survivors will want to be without this book, and school-based professionals, social workers, psychologists and others committed to working with traumatized children will find the book chock-full of game-changing ideas for their practice.