Hello everybody,
Today I am doing something a little different than our usual podcast.
Today I am interviewing,
Oops wrong way,
There we go,
I am having an interview with my new book which is just coming out today.
Today is its birthday and so I wanted a chance to talk a little bit about the book and our relationship because the book and I in one sense go back a long,
Long,
Long way because the book is about,
Oh sorry I should tell you what it's called,
It's called Embracing Our Fragmented Selves and it's a workbook that follows from my first book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors.
So Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors goes back probably what over 10 years,
No 20 years,
To probably the mid to late 2000s when a student asked me,
What do you mean by trauma healing?
You know everybody was talking about trauma healing and I thought,
Yeah what do we mean when we say trauma healing?
And I let her know that I would get back to her,
That I wouldn't forget the question,
But that it was a complicated question because what do we mean by healing?
When we say to people you can heal,
What are we promising them?
And I thought to myself about all the ways that we treated trauma at the time and I thought,
You know people don't feel healed at the end of processing traumatic memories.
They may feel like,
They may feel relief,
They may feel like they climbed Mount Everest and they made it,
But they don't feel healed.
And then I thought and I thought and having a successful life after trauma,
And by successful I don't necessarily mean financially or professionally,
Successful in the sense that life is full and rich and that isn't necessarily healing.
It's a great boon,
It's wonderful to live well after trauma.
So I kept thinking and thinking and thinking and then it came to me.
I thought,
Oh healing is what happens at the moment that we accept ourselves,
At the moment that we forgive ourselves,
That we know that it wasn't our fault and we even,
Even if grudgingly,
Begin to love ourselves.
And so I set out to design a treatment that would in fact accomplish those goals.
How could we get from the state in which clients presented therapy to a place where their parts feel safe and they feel a sense of inner compassion and loving-kindness?
Not easy,
Not easy to do.
And Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors talked about that process,
But a book that talks intellectually about the process is different than a workbook that is a process in and of itself.
And that's what I felt I needed to write.
Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors became eventually trauma-informed stabilization treatment,
Which is my treatment model,
TIST,
And I thought wouldn't it be wonderful to have a workbook that goes with that treatment so that the clients get more than the 50 minutes or 45 minutes of an individual therapy session.
They have a way of extending the session over all the other hours of the day and the week.
They have a way to what I call exercise their emotional muscles by having worksheets that they can use and to practice the skills because healing and recovery involves skill and not just inspiration.
