Download Confessions of a Trauma Therapist: A Memoir of Healing and Transformation ePub

This book never presents any feeling of "darkness," "foreboding" or hopelessless, though it deals with childhood sexual abuse and trauma and its fallout in a survivor's life. It is a true life story of the author and how she rebuilt herself, having had no "sense of self" because of how she was abused. It is a remarkable story, hers, yet in her open sharing of her life and story, one never feels the healing she found is in any way unattainable. This is a story filled with light and hope as well as true insight into how healing is available and triumphant change is indeed possible. I would recommend this book, without hesitation, to any survivor or sexual abuse and trauma. This book and the life of the author are truly gifts to our world.

I've read the book on one breath. Couldn't stop reading.

I am currently working with a trauma therapist. This fascinating book from the perspective of both a trauma survivor and trauma therapist has been very helpful to me. If you have suffered childhood abuse or neglect of any kind I would highly recommend you read it.

Mary Armstrong gives readers a tour of the experience of childhood sexual abuse. Based on her own recovered memories, the book clearly shows what goes on in the minds of an abused child during and after the experience. Therapists, victims and other readers will gain new insight to the mental and emotional devastation caused by intimate betrayal. Ms. Armstrong - who is a prominent mental health professional specializing in the field of dissociation and childhood sexual abuse - did not have access to her own memories until years after she became a therapist. She was shocked and horrified to discover that she was just like her patients - a person with a buried past. As memories began to flood into her awareness in middle age, Mary suffered the disorientation, confusion and self-doubt that is so characteristic of the initial phases of recovery. Eventually, however, everything began to make sense to her: her anxiety, her relationship issues, her somatic experiences. As she began to own her own history, she became whole for the first time. Mary details the process of recovery, offering a guide to professionals, sufferers and their families that is informative, reassuring and hopeful. Every reader will gain a new understanding and compassion that can help our society face and heal the plague of childhood abuse.
Sarah Chana Radcliffe, Author of "Raise Your Kids without Raising Your Voice"

This is a terrific, insightful memoir. Let's begin with the title, a sly slice of irony. Why is the therapist confessing, when it is usually the client who confesses and reveals? Why, because she herself, the brave Mary Armstrong, is both the therapist/confessor and the client/revealer.

As Armstrong details in this book, her life unfolded through school, marriage, and an intense yoga training, so that she came to be a therapist. When she found the body-centered form that drew her most, the practice known as Focusing, when her life seemed stable, that's when the memories and flashbacks came. She was in her forties. She was as ready, perhaps, as a person can be. Even so, she doubted herself. Could she throw her concepts of her loving, eccentric family - her caring grandfather and interesting father - out the window? As a survivor who had to do the same dance of refashioning my entire view of my family, I empathize.

Armstrong indeed had the courage to not only face these violent invasive memories, but to document her struggle in her journals, which she excerpts to show us how it felt. The book begins relatively slowly, telling us in advance that the memories will come, but building up the picture, step by step, of a life that unfolds with reflection and depth. Then when the memories come, the pace quickens and it all becomes very vivid.

The double view of surviving abuse--the perspectives of therapist and of client/survivor--reminds me of a studio with mirrors, where we may witness the dance of discovery from two angles at once.

Armstrong's life-story is a testimony to human strength and resilience. It's an inspiring read as we see her vulnerability but we also know she's a prominent therapist who has helped many others in her lifetime. I recommend this book highly.

~~ Jane Rowan, author of The River of Forgetting: A Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse