All caregivers are called upon to recognize both the pain and beauty in this world and to help move society towards an “Ideal City�. Beauty is the aesthetic by which healers can care for their patients. The book proclaims three manifestos for healing: • Healing a Violent World. Healers of every type are called on to reduce the pain of human suffering by working towards a non-violent, empathetic world. • Healing the Healer. Those who give care to the suffering patient in turn suffer themselves, and this manifesto asks that healers recognize their vulnerability, and to engage in conversation to help them towards diminishing the pain that they feel. • Healing Power of Justice. Justice needs to be recognized as the pathway to healing. Justice is a powerful force for human and social transformation and its pursuit is both intense and often tragic. These three manifestos, together with the sentiments of poetry that intersperses them, are published here to awaken your sense of healing. This book is published in partnership with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma (HPRT) which has pioneered the health and mental health of survivors of mass violence and torture, refugees, and traumatized communities worldwide over the past four decades.

In these personal reflections on his thirty years of clinical work with victims of genocide, torture, and abuse in the United States, Cambodia, Bosnia, and other parts of the world, Richard Mollica describes the surprising capacity of traumatized people to heal themselves.

Here is how Neil Boothby, Director of the Program on Forced Migration and Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, describes the book:

"Mollica provides a wealth of ethnographic and clinical evidence that suggests the human capacity to heal is innate--that the 'survival instinct' extends beyond the physical to include the psychological as well. He enables us to see how recovery from 'traumatic life events' needs to be viewed primarily as a 'mystery' to be listened to and explored, rather than solely as a 'problem' to be identified and solved. Healing involves a quest for meaning--with all of its emotional, cultural, religious, spiritual and existential attendants--even when bio-chemical reactions are also operative."

"Healing Invisible Wounds" reveals how trauma survivors, through the telling of their stories, teach all of us how to deal with the tragic events of everyday life. Mollica's important discovery that humiliation--an instrument of violence that also leads to anger and despair--can be transformed through his therapeutic project into solace and redemption is a remarkable new contribution to survivors and clinicians.

This book reveals how in every society we have to move away from viewing trauma survivors as "broken people" and "outcasts" to seeing them as courageous people actively contributing to larger social goals. When violence occurs, there is damage not only to individuals but to entire societies, and to the world. Through the journey of self-healing that survivors make, they enable the rest of us not only as individuals but as entire communities to recover from injury in a violent world.