Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma - (The Living Legacy of Trauma) by Janina Fisher (Paperback)

About the Book

Janina Fisher has spent 40 years working with trauma survivors, helping them to navigate towards healing. In Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma, she shows how the symptom legacy helped them survive and offers healing strategies.

Book Synopsis

Traumatic experiences leave a "living legacy" of effects that often persist for years and decades after the events are over. Historically, it has always been assumed that re-telling the story of what happened would resolve these effects.

However, survivors report a different experience: Telling and re-telling the story of what happened to them often reactivates their trauma responses, overwhelming them rather than resolving the trauma. To transform traumatic experiences, survivors need to understand their symptoms and reactions as normal responses to abnormal events. They need ways to work with the symptoms that intrude on their daily activities, preventing a life beyond trauma.

Dr. Janina Fisher, international expert on trauma, has spent over 40 years working with survivors, helping them to navigate their journey. In Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma, she shows how the legacy of symptoms helped them survive and offers:

Step-by-step strategies that can be used on their own or in collaboration with a therapist

Simple diagrams that make sense of the confusing feelings and physical reactions survivors experience

Worksheets to practice the skills that bring relief and ultimately rejuvenation

Review Quotes

In this succinct and well-organized volume, Janina Fisher distills the essence of modern trauma theory and the deep wisdom of her decades of clinical experience. The result is a welcome, reader-friendly primer for personal use or to support professional work with trauma survivors. --Gabor Maté, M.D.; author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction

This workbook is an extraordinary gift for therapists and clients alike. With her trademark compassion, Dr. Fisher succeeds in de-pathologizing and simplifying the complexities of the cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral residue of trauma.

--Lisa Ferentz, author of Letting Go of Self-Destructive Behaviors: A Workbook of Hope and Healing

Written with her characteristic hopefulness and clarity, this workbook showcases Janina Fisher s unique gift of getting to the essence of things. Complex theories are transformed into simple, easily understood, useful concepts that teach clients to make sense of their symptoms, to befriend their coping strategies, and to practice effective skills to relieve their suffering. Most importantly, this book will inspire the confidence to realize that healing is possible for even the most traumatized survivor.

--Pat Ogden, PhD, author of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment and The Pocket Guide to Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

About the Author

Janina Fisher, PhD, is the assistant educational director of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute and a former instructor at Harvard Medical School. An international expert on the treatment of trauma, she is the author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Self-Alienation and is co-author with Pat Ogden of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Attachment and Trauma. She is known for her work on integrating neuroscience research and new body-centered interventions into traditional psychotherapy approaches.