There is so much to learn. And thankfully, many excellent resources are available. Here is a list of some that have helped me enormously. I hope they help you, too. Let me know whether you have another valuable resource that I might investigate and add.
Some Print and Web Resources about PTSD and Trauma
Bass, Ellen, and Laura Davis. The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, 3rd Ed. New York: Collins Living, 2008. Print.
Hay, Louise. You Can Heal Your Life. Hay House Books. Print.
Herman, Dr. Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York City: Basic Books, 1997. Print.
Levine, Dr. Peter, and Ann Frederick. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997. Print.
Maté, Dr. Gabor. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010. Print.
Murray, Dr. Bob. “PTSD and Childhood Trauma.” Uplift Program. Web. 2013. <www.upliftprogram.com/articleptsd.html>.
Nesaule, Agate. A Woman in Amber. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. Print.
“The New Traumatology & the Trauma Spectrum: A Conversation between Dr. Robert Scaer and Cultural Animator Anthony ‘Twig’ Wheeler.” Vimeo.com. Vimeo, Web. 27 May 2013. <www.vimeo.com>.
Perry, Dr. Bruce D., and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us about Loss, Love, and Healing. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Print.
Rogers, Annie G. A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. Print.
Scaer, Dr. Robert. The Trauma Spectrum: Hidden Wounds and Human Resiliency. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. Print.
Siegel, Dr. Daniel J. Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. New York: Bantam Books, 2010. Print.
Terr, Dr. Lenore. Too Scared to Cry: How Trauma Affects Children…and Ultimately Us All. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Print.
Tinnin, Dr. Louis. Infant Surgery without Anesthesia. Louis Tinnin. 2013. Weblog. <http://ltinnin.wordpress.com/>.
Tinnin, Dr. Louis, and Dr. Linda Gantt. The Instinctual Trauma Response & Dual-Brain Dynamics. Morgantown, West Virginia: Gargoyle Press, 2013. Print.
Vanderbom, Fred. Stories from the Survivors of Early Surgery. Fred Vanderbom. 2013. Weblog. <http://survivinginfantsurgery.wordpress.com>.
Williams, Wendy Patrice. ReStory Your Life – Freedom After Trauma. Wendy Patrice Williams. 2013. Web. <www.restoryyourlife.com>.
Bodywork Resources
Griffin Toffler. Breath Therapist. Sacramento, California. <http://www.griffintoffler.weebly.com>.
Juerg Roffler. Breath Therapist. San Francisco Bay Area, California. <www.breathexperience.com>.
Thanks for this list …it looks like a great place to start for people like us to start to understand this trauma that even my Dr. ( whom I consider better than most) didn’t know happened to infants/us. This is amazing FACT that very few people will even want to admit ever happened to infants in this supposedly “modern/advanced “society. Heck I don’t even want to believe that this happened…and it happened to me!
Deon
Dean, I can hardly believe it myself. It feels like an awful, awful dream that I don’t even want to admit happened. But the more that I learn and understand what happened, the more I understand myself and gain compassion for me. Drs. Tinnin and Gantt’s book would be a good place to start. He really gets the infant surgery trauma. Fabulous book! And Levine’s book, Waking the Tiger, is a great place to understand the freeze response of the trauma cycle. Check his website out and youtube. I think there’s a video of him discussing it. Oh, and The New Traumatology video is another good beginning place. It’s awful what happened to us, Dean, and it’s a miracle we survived. I used to wish I’d died, but I see there’s a way to make meaning even out of infant torture.
Wendy , that’s a lot like i feel. And i also feel like i ‘did’ die. For a long long time i thought it was my imagination …I sometimes repressed it…that’s part of the reason I went into psychology…..but some recent trauma brought it to the forefront again, and I believe this is the very root of the trauma I have….I was so dehydrated and weak from all the vomiting and religious dogma taboos against my getting a surgery that I would imagine the pain from the scalpel and all the roughness of the surgery which was done most likely with great haste (i assume they knew that the chances of the child surviving were greater the faster they could get the surgery done quickly…I have read of a lot of deaths from these …non-anestitized infant surgeries) …I have long assumed that my certainty that I had experienced an out of body experience at one time or another was such a part of me ….and that is my nonverbal memory telling me that this indescribable thing happened to me at one time or another …but because it was when I was not yet verbal I could only feel it ….and have always had great difficulty trying to describe let alone convince someone of this, including myself. I plan to read these books over the next few months and I hope that they will help me as much as they seem to be helping you. It does feel like a really bad dream that i wish were not true …but that is how I deal with things in the “freeze effect” part of the description…I am a master procrastinator ..and it’s something that I greatly want to overcome….because there are so many places I want to travel to and do ….this procrastination/freeze response is constantly getting in my way. I assume by gaining compassion for myself will help me to accept that there is a
wall that I will have to tear down every time i want to do something new and a bit Unique. But that’s what makes life exciting and procrastination is constantly getting in the way. Like you say …gaining compassion for myself will let me tear down the walls ( to use a Pink Floyd term ) so that I can start doing the things this I want to do. I am starting to see that the mistrust that I have for people and my family comes from the basic question of …How could they have let me have been treated so brutally and then never mention it for the next 50 or so years? My family dynamic was such that my father and mother were both adult children of alcoholics so they were so busy making sure that everyone got treated equally ..there was little consideration of what I had to go through just to survive as an infant…not to mention the sadistic ways my brothers treated me that was ignored by my parents as too possible of causing conflict …it was dismissed as untrue. It will take me a while to digest all this material because I am not the worlds fastest reader…but I must be able to overcome this …I really believe that it is at the crux of my PTSD …and now that I know where it’s origin is from, I can finally address it. Again thanks for the literary references . And good luck exorcising your trauma daemons. Dean
Well, Dean, you and I are often on the same page. I too am afraid to do something/anything unique and new due to inordinate fear. I wouldn’t say that I procrastinate so much as feel dang helpless a lot and so don’t do some of the things I really want and need to do. I simply don’t believe I have the power to do them. About your out of the body experience, I read an excerpt of my memoir manusript about infant surgery at this reading in Marin County and woman in the audience told me about a collection of stories of out of body experiences that the contributors had as children during surgery and during other traumas. I lost touch with her but still have her phone number and will probably call her one day for this reference. She helped me realize that I probably had an out of body experience during the surgery. I actually think I saw my stomach being pulled out of the incision so it could be lanced! I blogged about it a few Christmases ago. Last night, I was thinking about you getting started on the references I listed and wondered if you’ve read Dr. David B. Chamberlain’s article “Babies Don’t Feel Pain: A Century of Denial in Medicine.” Here’s the link: <http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html>;. It’s probably the best best place to start. It’s one of the first articles i read about all this.
Thank you for your frank sharing. I am so appreciative of it.
Wendy
It is very exciting for me to follow this discussion.
Wendy, thanks for your role as an educator and in continuing to make links to some of the key books and web-based articles available on your blog.
Dean, your combined horror and excitement over what you are discovering is sending warm vibes all the way to the most southerly and coldest part of Australia! Your healing is underway, even though you’ll never lose what you have experienced as long as you live.
Please keep up your public correspondence.
I love this hopeful message to Dean. Indeed, healing is on the way and the vibes are traveling from down south all the way to California and beyond. About the resource list, it’s amazing how it keeps growing. There’s a lot more clarity about preverbal and infant trauma these days, and more and more is emerging. I’m grateful to have survived long enough to see these profound changes. Although only a tiny hill in sand has been made, we’re on our way to making a mountain.