Parenting Trauma

Many foster and adoptive parents are raising children with complex emotional trauma, desperate for answers to heal their families. Caught off guard, these families find themselves with shattered dreams, shattered homes, and shattered hearts, with nowhere to turn for answers. Extended family members, friends, and the greater community don't understand the challenges and can, sometimes, add to the problems these families face, prolonging the healing process for all.

With a bachelor's and master's degree in education and over 30 years of experience, plus training in trauma sensitivity, author and mother of two, Jennifer Alushan, is ready to give parents and caregivers proven techniques to effectively understand and authentically interact with children so the healing process can begin.

If you're constantly feeling on edge, forever working to appease your spouse to little avail and feel like you're constantly being chipped away at with their abusive behavior, then I can understand how emotionally shattering it feels to live this way. If, in the same breath, it breaks your heart to even consider leaving them because you can't imagine life without them, then I can understand that feeling too - because I was trauma bonded to my abusive ex.

Explaining that an impaired capacity for connection to self and to others underlies most psychological and many physiological problems, clinicians Laurence Heller, PhD, and Aline LaPierre, PsyD, introduce the NeuroAffective Relational Model™ (NARM), a unified approach to developmental, attachment, and shock trauma that emphasizes working in the present moment. NARM is a somatically based psychotherapy that helps bring into awareness the parts of self that are disorganized and dysfunctional.

From our earliest years, we develop an attachment style that follows us through life, replaying in our daily emotional landscape, our relationships, and how we feel about ourselves. And in the wake of a traumatic event - such as a car accident, severe illness, loss of a loved one, or experience of abuse - that attachment style can deeply influence what happens next.

Are you thriving in your relationship, or merely surviving? Are you the victim of constant manipulation, gaslighting, and deception at the hands of your partner? Do you find yourself constantly making excuses for your partner's abusive behavior? If you feel trapped in a relationship with someone who displays narcissistic or psychopathic behavior, you may be experiencing a trauma bond—a powerful connection you've developed with your abuser. It's important to remember that you're not alone and it's not your fault.

Every parent has had that painful moment of messing up and seeing that they need help if they are going to raise happy, emotionally healthy kids. For Jon Fogel, that moment came after yelling at his son and realizing he was making the same mistakes his own parents made. He knew something had to change; he needed to understand and redirect his own emotions. That realization put Fogel on a path toward wholeness: understanding himself, learning about the brain, naming his emotions.

Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.

Paul Scheer has entertained countless fans and podcast listeners with stories about the odd, wild, and absurd details of his life. Yet these tales have pointed to deeper, more difficult truths that the actor and comedian has kept to himself. Now, he is finally ready to share those truths for the first time—but, of course, with a healthy dose of humor.

William Avers takes us on an honest and revealing journey that will help us understand trauma bonding and its multiple faces, from unhealthy attachment to the normalization of the abuse to the concealment and later denial of the truth. William Avers explores the human condition without prejudice or bias because traumatic bonds may occur to anyone. Contrary to most people’s belief that abusers prey on the weak and foolish, abusers also prey on capable and attractive people because they seek the challenge too.

Writer Peg Streep lays out seven distinct but interconnected stages on the path to reclaim your life from the effects of a toxic childhood: "discover", "discernment", "distinguish", "disarm", "reclaim", "redirect", and "recover". Each step is clearly explained and richly detailed with the stories of other women. With approaches drawn from psychology and other disciplines and with unique exercises, the book will help the listener tackle her own self-doubt and become consciously aware of how her mother's treatment continues to shape her behavior.

Looking at your childhood with the compassionate eyes of a mature and conscious adult, you can recognize where you needed something more. With the help of this guide, you don’t have to wonder if you’ll ever get over the bad experiences of the past or ever be free of their hold on you. Every single exercise, reflection, or action you take as you listen to this book will help create positive shifts in your life that will have beneficial ripple effects echoing constructively on every level of your world.

For the past decade, author Tian Dayton has been researching trauma and addiction, and how psychodrama (or sociometry group psychotherapy) can be used in their treatment. This latest book identifies the interconnection of trauma and addictive behavior, and shows why they can become an unending cycle. This groundbreaking audiobook offers listeners effective ways to work through their traumas in order to heal their addictions and their predilection toward what clinicians call self-medicating.

Combining insights from mainstream science, psychology, and subtle healing modalities, this book provides a truly holistic approach to recovery. Renowned author and spiritual healer Cyndi Dale shares an impressive array of techniques for resolving challenging energetic and spiritual issues. Trauma and pain caused by environmental, physical, psychological, and spiritual forces can have major effects on every aspect of your life. Join Cyndi as she shows how to align with spirit guides, work with the chakras, locate hidden inner wounds, release other peoples' energies, and much more.

A longtime trauma worker, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky offers a deep and empathetic survey of the often-unrecognized toll on those working to make the world a better place. We may feel tired, cynical, numb, or like we can never do enough. These, and other symptoms, affect us individually and collectively, sapping the energy and effectiveness we so desperately need if we are to benefit humankind, other animals, and the planet itself. Through Trauma Stewardship, we are called to meet these challenges in an intentional way.

Our human nervous system has the power to cope with high stress but not when it's been ground down by the relentless stimuli of today’s world. Over time, these persistent demands leave us burnt out because our nervous system is stuck in survival mode. In this mode, we have reduced capacity for rational thinking and less capacity to care. Dr. Claire Plumbly draws on polyvagal theory and her professional insights as a trauma therapist working with clients experiencing anxiety, trauma and burnout to give you tools to thrive amidst the challenges of modern life, at work, at home.

Have you ever wondered "Why did I do that?" or "Why can't I just control my behavior?" Others may judge our reactions and think, "What's wrong with that person?" When questioning our emotions, it's easy to place the blame on ourselves; holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It's time we started asking a different question. Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”

Trauma can result not only from catastrophic events such as abuse, violence, or loss of loved ones, but from natural disasters and everyday incidents like auto accidents, medical procedures, divorce, or even falling off a bicycle. At the core of this book is the understanding of how trauma is imprinted on the body, brain, and spirit—often resulting in anxiety, nightmares, depression, physical illnesses, addictions, hyperactivity, and aggression.

Therapist and meditation teacher Ralph De La Rosa places the innovative, evidence-based model of Internal Family Systems (IFS) in the context of Buddhist meditation to show that the process of healing trauma can lead you to your deepest spiritual nature. This book offers clear conceptual frameworks to understand trauma, post-traumatic growth, and the close relationship between healing trauma and spirituality. The many journal prompts, experiential practices, and guided meditations will teach you how to

Written in plain English and packed with sensitive, authoritative information, Codependency for Dummies, 2nd Edition describes the history, symptoms, causes, and relationship dynamics of codependency. The majority of the book is devoted to healing and lays out a clear plan for recovery with exercises, practical advice, and daily reminders to help you know, honor, protect, and express yourself, with new chapters on working the 12 Steps to recover from codependency and how therapists/coaches/nurses are affected by codependency.