Trauma Informed Education

In this fresh look at trauma-informed practice, Alex Shevrin Venet urges educators to shift equity to the center as they consider policies and professional development.

Imagine, if you will, a disease - one that has only subtle outward symptoms but can hijack your entire body without notice; one that transfers easily between parent and child; one that can last a lifetime if untreated. According to Dr. Paul Conti, this is exactly how society should conceptualize trauma: as an out-of-control epidemic with a potentially fatal prognosis. In Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic, Dr. Conti examines the most recent research, clinical best practices, and dozens of real-life stories to present a deeper, richer, and more urgent view of trauma.

The premise of Trauma and the Body is that, by adding body-oriented interventions to their repertoire, traditionally trained therapists can increase the depth and efficacy of their clinical work. Sensorimotor psychotherapy is an approach that builds on traditional psychotherapeutic understanding but includes the body as central in the therapeutic field of awareness, using observational skills, theories, and interventions not usually practiced in psychodynamic psychotherapy.

From elementary schools to psychotherapy offices, mindfulness meditation is an increasingly mainstream practice. At the same time, trauma remains a fact of life. Drawing on a decade of research and clinical experience, psychotherapist and educator David Treleaven shows that mindfulness meditation - practiced without an awareness of trauma - can exacerbate symptoms of traumatic stress. This raises a crucial question: How can we minimize the potential dangers of mindfulness for survivors while leveraging its powerful benefits?

With accessible strategies grounded in trauma-informed education and positive psychology, this audiobook equips teachers to support all students, particularly the most vulnerable. It will help them to build their resilience, increase their motivation and engagement, and fulfil their full learning potential within the classroom. Based on the successful Berry Street education strategies pioneered by the authors and includes comprehensive case studies, learning points and opportunities for self-reflection, fully supporting teachers to implement these strategies within the classroom.

A new model of therapeutic action, one that heals trauma and dissociation, is overtaking the mental-health field. It is not just trauma, but the dissociation of the self, that causes emotional pain and difficulties in functioning. This book discusses how people are universally subject to trauma, what trauma is, and how to understand and work with normative as well as extreme dissociation. In this new model, the client and the practitioner are both traumatized and flawed human beings who affect each other in the mutual process that the promotes the healing of the client-psychotherapy.

In this audiobook, Dr Bessel van der Kolk offers a new paradigm for effectively treating traumatic stress. Neither talking nor drug therapies have proven entirely satisfactory. With stories of his own work and those of specialists around the globe, The Body Keeps the Score sheds new light on the routes away from trauma - which lie in the regulation and syncing of body and mind, using sport, drama, yoga, mindfulness, meditation and other routes to equilibrium.

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.

In Trauma and Memory, best-selling author Dr. Peter Levine (creator of the Somatic Experiencing approach) tackles one of the most difficult and controversial questions of PTSD/trauma therapy: Can we trust our memories? While some argue that traumatic memories are unreliable and not useful, others insist that we absolutely must rely on memory to make sense of past experience. Dr. Levine suggests that there are elements of truth in both camps.

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.

The Therapeutic School Approach offers teachers and school leaders a step-by-step guide to embedding a trauma-informed approach that is tangible, practical, and brings the underpinning science to life in a way that is relatable and relevant. Placing a keen focus on moving towards a more inclusive way of working, it advocates for a culture that puts wellbeing and mental health at the core of teaching and school life.