My latest book is textbook-like, as it is a guide for psychotherapists and other helpers to learn my multidimensional approach to effectively treating the childhood trauma that is commonly at the roots of Complex PTSD. This book reorganizes and greatly expands the material of my earlier books. It emphasizes the crucial importance of relational psychotherapy in healing the fear and distrust that most survivors have of all other people. It can deeply aid therapists to mend the damage and arrested development that survivors experienced as traumatized children in the “care” of abusive and/or neglectful parents or other caretakers.
Many therapists have gratefully conveyed to me that the map, perspective, and tools herein for healing complex trauma aids their clients to identify, repair and evolve six key dimensions of their damaged and arrested development. These dimensions are the Relational, Behavioral, Cognitive, Emotional, Somatic, and Spiritual layers of their as-yet unmanifested innate Intelligence.
This damage and developmental delay can be remediated when therapists and/or other supportive people use the guidance and techniques that are fleshed out in this book. Such practice has helped many of them to become highly effective, trauma-informed therapists.
The psychoeducational approach herein helps survivors see that their symptoms are normal child reactions to abnormal upbringings that are steeped in abuse and neglect, danger, and lovelessness. Numerous trauma survivors tell me that my books are especially beneficial because they are almost immediately helpful, de-shaming, relieving and comforting.
Therapists can learn how to greatly aid survivors by helping them to see that, as children, they were helpless to recognize and defend themselves from being traumatized. With the therapists' help and compassion, this knowledge then aids them to develop self-compassion for their lifelong suffering.
When therapists successfully midwife the rebirth of survivors’ innate self-compassion, they can then expand it into helping them reclaim their instincts of healthy self-protection. This can then be used against their early brainwashing of being indoctrinated with a self-hating inner critic that viciously blames for all their suffering. Many survivors have embraced my model because it guides them to develop their arrested, instinctual trauma-healing self-kindness and self-protectiveness.
The fact that I am a CPTSD survivor myself with a good deal of recovery enables me to enrich this book with illustrative vignettes of what can and cannot aid their recovery. Over and over, survivors tell me that my vulnerable self-disclosure calms and de-shames them, teaches them therapeutic self-help techniques, and increases their motivation to work at recovering.
