Trauma results in a wide variety of human unhappiness. In parallel, treatment of the consequences of trauma ranges from drugs, to single session psychological techniques, to management and cognitive therapies, to psychotherapies which take years. Some therapies deal with individuals, others with groups, some with children, and others with adults. With such a multiplicity of options, it can be difficult to make sense of the variety of manifestations and treatments. This work aims to clarify the situation by offering tools to conceptualize and treat a range of symptoms and illnesses, and to replace them with equally well conceptualized fulfillment alternatives. It is geared towards traumatologists, psychologists, counsellors, and social workers who help those who have suffered assault, bereavement, sexual abuse, or disasters. Upper level undergraduates students, graduate students and professors in trauma, loss, and bereavement.

Trauma results in a wide variety of human unhappiness. In parallel, treatment of the consequences of trauma ranges from drugs, to single session psychological techniques, to management and cognitive therapies, to psychotherapies which take years. Some therapies deal with individuals, others with groups, some with children, and others with adults. With such a multiplicity of options, it can be difficult to make sense of the variety of manifestations and treatments. This work aims to clarify the situation by offering tools to conceptualize and treat a range of symptoms and illnesses, and to replace them with equally well conceptualized fulfillment alternatives. It is geared towards traumatologists, psychologists, counsellors, and social workers who help those who have suffered assault, bereavement, sexual abuse, or disasters. Upper level undergraduates students, graduate students and professors in trauma, loss, and bereavement.

Related link: Free Email Alerting

Traumatologist Paul Valent believes that knowledge of human responses in disasters can help individuals and societies to better control catastrophic events, such as the present pandemic. This concise book will help the general reader to understand the very wide mental health effects of this pandemic, and thus to understand how distress may be better managed today and in the future. The author summarises disaster responses as they have manifested in this pandemic. These responses are biological, psychological and social, and they affect individuals, families, children and vulnerable groups. He also provides a framework which helps to the reader to understand, and thus be better informed to treat, the wide-ranging consequences of the pandemic.

Paul Valent sees that the dialectic is not between "life and death" but between "life and trauma". This text theorizes that the big issues of life can now be approached through the science of traumatology. Through communication with, and observation of, people whose lives have been stretched under stress or disrupted by trauma, the fulfilling components of their lives can be defined, oriented and categorized. It introduces the theory on the back of clinical and historical material, examining the current state of such concepts as stress, trauma, defences, memories, post post-traumatic stress disorder, and other illnesses. It should be of interest to those in the healing professions or to those who work with traumatized individuals (lawyers, social workers and the clergy) and those in the humanities in general.

Paul Valent sees that the dialectic is not between "life and death" but between "life and trauma". This text theorizes that the big issues of life can now be approached through the science of traumatology. Through communication with, and observation of, people whose lives have been stretched under stress or disrupted by trauma, the fulfilling components of their lives can be defined, oriented and categorized. It introduces the theory on the back of clinical and historical material, examining the current state of such concepts as stress, trauma, defences, memories, post post-traumatic stress disorder, and other illnesses.; It should be of interest to those in the healing professions or to those who work with traumatized individuals lawyers, social workers and the clergy and those in the humanities in general.

Related link: Free Email Alerting

At the end of the Second World War approximately 1.5 million Jewish children had been killed by the Nazis. In this book, ten child survivors tell their stories. Paul Valent, himself a child survivor and psychiatrist, explores with profound analytical insight the deepest memories of those survivors he interviewed. Their experiences range from living in hiding to physical and sexual abuse. Child Survivors of the Holocaust preserves and integrates the personal narratives and the therapist's perspective in an amazing chronicle. The stories in this book contribute to questions concerning the roots of morality, memory, resilience, and specifc scientific queries of the origins of psychosomatic symptoms, psychiatric illness, and trans-generational transmission of trauma. Child Survivors of the Holocaust speaks to the trauma facing contemporary child victims of abuse worldwide through past narratives of the Holocaust.

Violence is the plague of our civilization. It threatens us daily through its many tentacles: domestic violence, criminal violence, sexual abuse, terrorism, state violence, revolution, war, and genocide. The recently evolved discipline of traumatology has amply described commonalities in the consequences of violence. But there was no corresponding discipline of violentology, which explained why violence occurred in the first place. Inexorably, Valent was drawn to take the leap from healing the minds of victims to try to understand the minds of perpetrators. Valent unpicks the minds of perpetrators in each field of violence. He develops a lens by which to understand violence from individual to international, and from primitive to spiritual dimensions. We come to understand how aggressions that helped our species to survive now threaten our species with extinction. Such understanding may help to eliminate our current plague, just as understanding helped to eliminate the original one. Valent explains his thesis through many stories accessible to both professionals and lay readers. One story interweaving throughout is Valent’s own story. From a child who survived the Holocaust, he ferrets out the minds of his perpetrators in his quest to prevent future violence. Violence, for Valent, is not an isolated feature of the human condition. Surprisingly close to violence are struggles for love. Readers also learn about that aspect of humanity.