In overwhelming trauma, when words fail, it is the body that begins to speak. How can clinicians listen to the body and understand its messages? This book is both a detailed review of the body symptoms and body image distortions found after trauma and a textbook of psychotherapy techniques to repair broken metaphors about the body so that the body-self and its functioning can be restored. Multiple theoretical perspectives--Freudian psychoanalytic theory, attachment theory, trauma theory--are synthesized to shape an interlocking framework within which the therapist can listen and stay with the messages from the patient's body. The reader is guided by detailed clinical examples drawn from an international group of trauma therapists that includes Barry Cohen, Richard Kluft, Bruce Perry, Valerie Sinason and Onno van der Hart.

This lyrical novel unfolds the magical story of a shattered narrator weaving her wholeness through language, analysis and the writing of stories and dreams. Franz Kafka remarked that 'a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us" this is such a book. Immersed in world mythology, psychoanalysis and an intense interiority, the narrator in this unsettling and fragmented book, finally claims the daylight world of a transformed reality. An astonishing journey into the psyche of a young woman recovering her self in this jigsaw puzzle of a novel, where the reader is made part of the puzzle.