Growing Beyond Survival: A Self-Help Toolkit for Managing Traumatic Stress

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Summary: Great Manual for learning Trust and Coping after trauma
Review: Easy to understand guidebook with exercises and great explanations. Helps traumatized people and those with PTSD to learn coping skills and to develop trust. The author points out that trust is essential before the person can start to heal or learn better ways to handle relationships and the problems of everyday life. Geared more towards people who were abused as children or adults in relatioships, it still has many useful tools and lessons for people with Combat PTSD. Probably most useful in combination with group or one on one therapy.

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Summary: A unique skills workbook empowering survivors
Review: Growing Beyond Survival is a unique skills workbook empowering survivors to take control of (and de-escalate) their most distressing trauma related symptoms. This self-regulation toolkit is comprehensive, flexible, and can be used independently as a self-paced, self-help program, or in the context of individual or groups therapy. Elizabeth Vermilyea offers a variety of expressive, containment, and visualization techniques that trauma survivors can draw upon to recognize, contextualize, and understand distressing dissociative and post-traumatic reactions. Growing Beyond Survival enables trauma survivors to understand where their symptoms come from and why, as well as become able to select and make use of different coping tools and strategies for self-regulation and resolution purposes. Very highly recommended as a personal and professional trauma stress reduction reference library.

Rating:
Summary: really helpful
Review: This is one of the best self-help books for trauma because it teaches useful skills. I'd recommend it to anyone who is struggling with nightmares, flashbacks, spacing out, etc. It's more for child abuse survivors, but I think the exercises would work for any kind of trauma. My therapist likes it too, and we work on these skills together.