Amazon.com: Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-―From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror: 9781541602953: Herman MD, Judith Lewis: Books (original) (raw)
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- 5 out of 5 stars
A political and very necessary book.
Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2004
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This is not your usual trauma recovery book. Most books on healing explain symptoms, offer exercises, and provide illuminating case histories. Judith Herman does all this, but she goes beyond just focusing on healing oneself in isolation. We are social animals, and must live within our culture. Thus, how our culture regards trauma and traumatized people is very important to those trying to become reintegrated into society after massive psychic shock. Dr. Herman explains our modern Western culture's attitudes toward trauma and the traumatized, gives a fascinating and pertinent history of how those attitudes have changed throughout the past century, and shows how those attitudes affect how survivors recover.
Dr. Herman sets forth most of this broader cultural history in Part 1, Chapter 1, "A Forgotten History." She begins with the female hysteria patients of 19th Century Europe, and ends up with the Vietnam veterans' movement to demand treatment for battle induced post-traumatic stress. The veterans' work bore fruit. In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association included "post-traumatic stress disorder" in its official manual of mental disorders. This paved the way in the 1980s for victims of rape, childhood abuse, and domestic violence to be treated for post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.
Part of the history Herman sets forth explores why people tend to shun and try to silence trauma survivors. She writes, "It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering."
I would guess that most people recovering from trauma have experienced the dynamic of those around them "taking the side of the perpetrator." Without understanding why they are doing so only compounds the suffering the survivor experiences, and intensifies the feeling that one is tainted, bad, or defective for having been traumatized in the first place. In exploring the cultural dynamics of collective repression and denial, Herman does a great service to those who must heal and re-enter a culture which can sometimes be seen to be in league with the perpetrators in our world.
The remainder of Part 1 deals with the types of abuse and the symptoms which follow. This information can be found in other books, but here it is set in a larger cultural context which helps the reader to make more sense out of the symptoms.
Part 2 describes the stages of recovery. This information is very concrete, very helpful, and hopeful as well. Dr. Herman outlines three main stages: establishing safety, remembering and integrating one's story, and re-integrating oneself back into the social world.
This book is probably the most helpful book I have read on trauma recovery in 20 years. Dr. Herman's idea of exploring the social matrix in which healing occurs is brilliant. After all, we are all connected. We cannot heal ourselves without making some sort of peace with the culture around us. We cannot always change the attitudes of those around us, but we can learn to understand, and thus approach those who cannot comprehend our reality with at least some measure of forgiveness and compassion.
249 people found this helpful - 5 out of 5 stars
THE book to understanding trauma and depression
Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2013
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I have suffered from severe, debilitating depression for several years as a result of a trauma that is actually completely unrelated to what this book focuses on. Despite not having suffered trauma due to a rape, war or kidnapping, I found this book to be life-changing. I looked and searched endlessly for in-depth information to explain why I feel the way I do, and until this book, there was absolutely nothing out there. I came across countless webpages, medical literature, books, shows, blogs, essays, research papers, medical sites, and none explained WHY. A great deal of them focused on symptoms, but only general symptoms that could apply to a great deal of things. Besides, I already knew what my symptoms were. Another significant portion were dedicated to veterans and PTSD. I would read them, but again, they would still only discuss things on a very superficial basis. Blogs would talk about what medications people took, and arguments would ensue about who had the worse story. Medical literature would delve into explanations of which receptor and which brain lobe shrunk or expanded, and shock rates of rats. Why was there no simple explanation for why people feel these symptoms when suffering from trauma? I even asked my psychiatrist that I see twice a week -I would beg him to explain to me in detail what I had, why I had this, when I would get better, and why I experienced these awful symptoms. He would always respond the same way.... that I had "complicated depression," "complicated grief," and that I had "experienced a severe trauma." Any symptom I specifically asked about, was just a "symptom common in trauma." Was there just NO explanation?
Based on my past experience with being let down, I had little faith this book would be able to explain what I have been going through for several years now, ESPECIALLY because it focuses on trauma related to rape, war, kidnapping. "Trauma and Recovery," however, explains trauma in a way that relates to EVERYONE and explains it in GREAT DETAIL. The detail and depth was beyond any hope I had or anything I could have imagined. It brought up points that I did not even consider, and thoughts that made me learn a great deal about my affliction. In fact, this book brought to light answers and closure for issues that I had tried to address with my $300/hr psychiatrist for the past 3 years. I thought to myself, "wtf?! what took my doctor so long and why has he been torturing me about this???!" Yes - this book WILL drum up emotions, and it did cost me plenty of tears and opening of wounds that were supposedly healed over, however, I definitely needed to understand the answers to these questions in order to move on.
This is an ideal book to have your family, spouse, significant other, or other supportive individual read. A great struggle for me, and one that has brought me much pain, is feeling as though I constantly have to explain myself and my actions/affliction to my family. They are actually the most supportive people anyone could ever hope for, yet they STILL can't understand what it is that I am going through or why I do the things I do. It is an awful feeling. I begged them to read this book, they didn't unfortunately, but I truly believe that if you love someone who is going through PTSD, depression/trauma/grief, you would show amazing support in reading this to help them.
In terms of what I have, and how this helped me.... I have experienced ups/downs, cycles of feeling great, then feeling terrible, not being able to get out of bed or my home for days even weeks, withdrawing socially, unable to work for several years, feeling unbelievably overwhelmed by the littlest of things, losing track of time, barely able to keep up with anything, uninterested in anything, no form of romantic relationships whatsoever, flashbacks to the event(s), extreme fatigue, uncontrollable sobbing, anxiety, hopelessness, chest pain, accelerated aging, feeling like something in me has permanently changed and I'm not "me", indifference, guilt. This is the foremost work in bringing to light the underlying cause(s) for these symptoms and why/how trauma affects us differently that just plain depression.
If you need this book, I send you my prayers and wish you the best in your or your loved one's recovery.
391 people found this helpful - 5 out of 5 stars
Thorough Work on Understanding & Treating Trauma
Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2016
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Excellent, in-depth book on various types of trauma and the effects & treatments.
There is some political slant, but it is not the focus of the book. If you are serious about understanding trauma and people, this is an incredible book. I'm amazed how thorough it is. I'm amazed this much information can be in one book that is only 276 pages long and not a text book. It's well-written. There is some sophisticated vocabulary in it...Several times I had to look up words in my online dictionary to fully understand what the author is communicating. She is wonderfully gifted in her approach to this subject.
She starts with history, goes into trauma and various treatments. She delineates differences of acute trauma of a single event vs chronic traumas. She delineates further on how even just one good support can help someone with trauma, vs the results of someone experiencing trauma yet having no validating support. One of her key points is Chaper 6..."A New Diagnosis"... discussing that complaints of chronically traumatized people are not well-understood. For example:... "Survivors of child abuse who become patients appear with a bewildering array of symptoms....They may collect a virtual pharmacopeia of remedies: one for headaches, another for insomnia, another for anxiety, another for depression. None of these tends to work very well, since the underlying issues of trauma are not addressed".
She talks about getting the correct diagnosis. Investigating under the symptoms, thoroughly knowing the history. After that, the treatments are not just medication or psychotherapy. It's often both, but in a certain way... Safety first, then trauma work, then reconnection. It even goes into the strengths & support the therapist needs to treat people who have experienced trauma as well as details of individual vs group therapies. This book also discusses medications, but doesn't have a multitude of pages devoted to medications.
Please understand my description here is just a slight outline. Trauma and Recovery is an incredibly thorough and well-written work. It also includes many pages of its referenced sources.
The epilogue discusses many things including recent studies, advances and programs since the book was written 2 decades ago.
I highly recommend this book.
74 people found this helpful - 5 out of 5 stars
Too much of the old ideology exists: a timely rethink!
Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2012
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This book was instrumental in providing me with a lot of insights that changed the way I understand misfortune.
Many intellectuals who borrowed from psychoanalysis, including Erich Fromm, Kleinians and others I read whilst studying for my thesis, implied indirectly that the symptoms of trauma were a result of moral failure. Indeed, I was only reminded of the nature of this association last night, when I watched the World War One drama, DOWNTOWN ABBEY. What can be worse that being killed? To be killed for cowardice. So a household servant is informed that her relative died in the war, but it was "worse than that". The ideology of "moral fiber" that is central to the 19th Century has not been overturned by the early part of the next. Rather, there was a notion that some possessed moral fiber, whereas others did not.
You would be able to see this ideology regarding the all-conquering character who makes no excuses, in Nietzsche. I'd like to think that my thesis on Marechera, who also has much of the Nietzschean spirit of wanting to conquer the world, but in an entirely different context, which did not permit permanent or definitive success, corrects previous suppositions about the structures of the psyche. The ability to persist in dangerous situations is certainly laudable, however, in contradiction to the 19th Century view we must now assume that such determination to persist when all the odds are against one will take its toll on the mind. This extraction of a cost nothing to do with anyone's innate capacity to follow through on an extremely difficult task. Rather, as we know today, everybody, even the strongest, has a breaking point. Some people may last longer than others under extreme duress, but more those of more rational views would frame this as a psychological issue, not a moral one*.
Judith Herman puts everything into context when she shows that those who suffer from trauma suffer not from their own limitations but from the limitations of those who should be part of their nearest communities. To take a brave risk is one thing, but if your community doesn't back you up, you are probably going to suffer from psychological trauma. Herman is certainly not suggesting a hippy-dippy attitude, where "community" is the answer to all wrongs. Rather, what she seems to suggest is that we are all interconnected. If you withdraw the human connection -- that is, the lifeline -- from somebody who has taken a risk, they are going to feel more in danger. The betrayal of trust will compute, at a psychological level, as trauma.
So it's not that the particular individual from whom you withdrew your moral support has some intrinsic moral lack.
The origin of the trauma is that you withdrew your support.
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*These days we seem to have flipped into biologism which, on the surface at least, seems exactly the opposite of the 19th Century view. In other words, biological "reasons" are invoked for people to take various chemicals to make them "normal". The problem is no longer a moral one, but one pertaining to one's unique, individual biological make-up. This view is as false as the 19th Century one -- even if it seems to offer the sufferer less difficulty in the short-term -- because the demand to unquestioningly conform to social norms remains as an unethical pressure.
55 people found this helpful
- 5 out of 5 stars
Phenomenal, Classic Work on Psychological Trauma and Recovery
Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2009
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The testimony of trauma survivors is at the heart of Herman's book. A Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, she spent two decades of research with victims of sexual, domestic, and various other types of trauma.
Her work also reflects a growing body of experience with traumatized combat veterans and victims of political terror.
Herman asserts that traumatic syndromes have basic features in common, and that the recovery process also follows a common pathway. The fundamental stages of recovery are:
1). Establishing safety.
2). Reconstructing the trauma story.
3). Restoring the connection between survivors and their community.
On p. 244, Herman points out that the subordination of women and children has been so deeply embedded in our culture, that the use of force against them, has only recently been recognized as a violation of basic human rights.
Plus battering, stalking, sexual harassment, and acquaintance rape were not even named, or understood to be crimes until they were defined by the feminist movement.
In this compelling work, Herman illuminates the worlds of war veterans, prisoners of war, battered women, rape and incest victims. On the aspect of recovery from traumatic events, Herman states that recovery unfolds in three stages:
First Stage-Establishment of Safety.
Second Stage-Remembrance and Mourning.
Third Stage-Reconnection with Ordinary Life.
She also notes that these stages are an abstract concept, not to be taken literally, for they are an attempt to impose simplicity and order on a process that is turbulent and complex. For there is no "magic bullet" for recovery from the traumatic syndromes.
It's hard to sum up the stunning breadth of Herman's work. Suffice it to say, that this book is a powerful tool for understanding the effect of trauma on human beings, and it can be immensely helpful in the healing process for all victims of trauma.
This should be recommended reading for our policymakers. It's a must read for returning war veterans and their families, to help them in their readjustment process.
The book also has an extensive, helpful index. I would give Herman's book 10 stars if I could. Very, very highly recommended!
25 people found this helpful - 4 out of 5 stars
Credible and compassionate
Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2012
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Judith Herman's classic volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new introduction to the 1997 edition, Herman explains how the issues surrounding trauma and recovery have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large. In the past we have considered these problems individually, but Herman weaves common ground for survivors of incest, rape, torture, war, captivity, and the holocaust. Her work, meticulously documented, frequently uses the victims' own words. This book is particularly valuable in understanding the long-term and complex aftereffects of ongoing, repetitive childhood abuse/captivity. She says, "Even PTSD as it is currently defined, does not fit accurately enough for survivors of prolonged trauma." She has given a new diagnosis: "complex post-traumatic stress disorder" for people who have grown up in a terroristic household. She explains that there is always a backlash when the "unspeakable" is spoken, and she offers encouragement to remain standing against repeated abuses. Herman not only describes various forms of trauma and their effects, she lays out the road to recovery. The book is credible and compassionate.
19 people found this helpful - 5 out of 5 stars
A great book to start with
Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2007
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This is like a primer on PTSD. The other reviewers have explained the ways in which it comprehensively describes PTSD in soldiers, rape victims, children, and political prisoners. It is stunning in its indictment of the violence of our human world.
But it is not a self-help book, or only so in a limited sense. If you are a survivor of trauma and are experiencing PTSD, this book is a good place to start, in order to understand that your symptoms make sense and are shared by other survivors of abuse. In other words, you are not alone. It may help you to demand the safety and control of your environment that are necessary for healing. Sometimes other well-meaning people are naive about the safety requirements of traumatized people, and this book can help them understand what you need.
In order to start healing your body-mind, though, the book to go to is Trauma Releasing Exercises by David Berceli. He also has an excellent website. He has devised a series of exercises to help the many millions in our violent world who are suffering from trauma. So many of these people have no access to therapists, because the circumstances that made them vulnerable to abuse also make them poor and without access to health care. These exercises are easy to understand and to perform, and they do help the body release the chronic tension that drives so many of the debilitating psychological symptoms of trauma.
23 people found this helpful - 5 out of 5 stars
This one is the best on the subject.
Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2013
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I have read them all. My own diagnosis came in 1998 when very few books had been written about PTSD and people still said, "What';s that?" and once you explained it they said, "Oh my God: What happened?"
Dr. Judith Herman's "Trauma and Recovery" is absolutely the best non-fiction book on the subject olut there. This book is just as excellent for the patient as for the physician, therapist and spouse or parent. It is critical. Not only does this book discuss the medical ramificatoions of PTSD (which is a medical disease, not a mental illness) but describes many details of the illness, the forms of treatment available and effective and attempts to give the reader and emotional experience similar to what PTSD feels like. For a clinical non-fiction book written by a medical doct0or, this book WAS the best for that as well. since then, Dennis McFarland has publised "Nostalgia", a work of fiction that does an outstanding job of giving the reader a few days inside the mind of someone aflicted with this horrific disease.
Almost every single married person with PTSD ends up divorced because the paretner has no way of understanding the despondent changes in his or her partner. The only way to combat this is through understanding what the afflicted is going through. This is the book to read first. follow it with "Nostalgia" and then rent the movies "Brave One" with Jodie Foster and "Sophie's Choice" with Meryl Streep.
Dr. Liswa Najavits wrote "Seeking safety" which is another wonderful book, but this is more for clinicians and a method of treatment that actually works, but it is not a research book whereas dr. Herman's book takes you by the hand and gently guides you.
This IS the best book on the subject.
25 people found this helpful