This is a global field guide to healing from trauma.
Healing from trauma is not a single journey-it is thousands of unique journeys.
From Hell to Health: Journeys Through PTSD/PTSI is an international anthology exploring the many paths toward healing from post-traumatic stress injury. Co-editors Randall Burks Sexton, psychiatric nurse practitioner, and Pamela Ellen Ferguson, global author and Zen Shiatsu instructor, combine decades of clinical experience, teaching, and lived wisdom to present one of the most comprehensive collections of personal stories and integrative healing approaches available today.
Veterans, therapists, physicians, counselors, artists, educators, and survivors share deeply personal accounts of confronting trauma-and finding hope beyond it. Their stories reveal the lasting effects of military service, domestic violence, racism, childhood abuse, political conflict, human trafficking, industrial accidents, cults, and school and urban violence.
This book is not defined by trauma. It is defined by healing.
Readers will discover conventional, complementary, and emerging therapies that have helped real people reclaim their lives. Alongside established clinical treatments, contributors explore meditation, bodywork, expressive arts, writing, music, community activism, spiritual practices, and other integrative approaches that nurture recovery of the mind, body, and spirit.
Contributors represent North and South America, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, Ukraine, Croatia, China, Egypt, Palestine, the West Indies, and nations throughout West and South Africa. Their voices reveal both the universal nature of trauma and the remarkable resilience of the human spirit while examining the impact of trauma on children, families, and generations.
Whether you are living with PTSD/PTSI, caring for someone who is, or serving as a psychiatrist, psychologist, counselor, social worker, physician, coach, chaplain, or integrative health practitioner, this anthology offers practical insight, compassionate understanding, and renewed hope. Each chapter reminds us that no single pathway to healing exists-and that recovery often begins by discovering the one that speaks to you.
In the Introduction, J.D. Messinger, Executive Director of the Do More Good® Movement and author of the #1 Amazon bestseller 11 Days in May, shares how many of the therapies featured in this anthology contributed to his own healing and have benefited more than a thousand executive coaching clients. His endorsement reinforces the book's central message: healing becomes possible when we remain open to new perspectives, courageous conversations, and compassionate care.
Published by Do More Good® Publishing, From Hell to Health reflects the Movement's mission to educate, empower, and amplify purpose-driven leaders who do more good.
No matter how deep the wounds of yesterday may be, tomorrow can begin with hope.
Pamela Ellen Ferguson Dipl ABT (NCCAOM), AOBTA(R) & GSD-CI, LMT (Texas) is an international author of several books of fiction and nonfiction published in the USA and in Europe in different languages. She is also an award-winning instructor of continuing education workshops in Asian Bodywork Therapy, and the author of major textbooks in her field. Pam is dual national, American and British, was born in Chihuahua Mexico, raised in Cornwall United Kingdom, and Cape Town South Africa. She has lived and worked in a dozen world capitals. She currently lives in Austin Texas surrounded by a garden of huge cacti, but teaches mainly in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.Her eclectic writing reflects an early career in journalism on London's Fleet Street, her reporting in the Middle East, her extensive travels and her current work in complementary medicine. Her tenth book, "Sunshine Picklelime," her first venture into writing for children, was published by Random House in the summer of 2010. Pam's initial career in full time journalism included the Financial Mail, (Johannesburg), The Times (London), Marketing and Adweek Magazines (London). Her freelance articles have also appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Design Magazine (UK), and the Dallas Morning News. During her second career, teaching in North America and Europe, Pam has pioneered Asian Bodywork Therapy workshops in hospitals and schools of nursing, and has also innovated graduate level training in Trauma and PTSD, Depression, Aids and HIV+, Women's Health/Men's Health, and Palliative Care. As a survivor of metastatic breast cancer, Pam transformed her experiences into a video, Drawing Circles of exercises for postmastectomy, and into creative ways of working with cancer patients and their families. As a breast cancer activist, Pam has written extensively about the value of combining Western and Asian Medicine, including a chapter in the anthology Confronting Cancer, Constructing Change. She was also a former President of the (Vermont based) Breast Cancer Action Group.Pam is certified as an instructor by the American Organization for Bodywork Therapies of Asia , and by the Shiatsu Society of Germany. She is also a Licensed Massage Therapist and approved Continuing Education Provider in Massage Therapy in the State of Texas. She is the former Dean of Asian Bodywork Therapy at AOMA Graduate School of Integrative Medicine, Austin, and also served on the national board of the American Organization for Bodywork Therapies of Asia as the first Director of the Council of Schools and Programs. She is the Asian Bodywork Therapy columnist of the monthly Acupuncture Today, and has also published articles in Massage Today, The North American Journal of Oriental Medicine (NAJOM) and the online International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork (IJTMB).Her passions include organic xeriscape gardening, and cycling. Her works in progress include a series of photographs of cycling activities in every city where she works and travels. She is also in the process of crafting her memoirs "Cornish Cactus - Mining Memories."Her previous work, "CROSSING LINES," an Austin-and-Border based political thriller, was published in October 2020 under her own imprint Border Coombe Press.
Randall Burks Sexton MSN, MBA, is a psychiatric nurse practitioner and Louisiana National Guard veteran employed in a multi-disciplinary Behavioral Team at Fort Riley Kansas. His integrative approach to treating PTSD/PTSI includes hypnosis, Zen Shiatsu, and shamanism in the indigenous Peruvian Q'ero tradition.
