"My latest book is a guide for psychotherapists and other helpers to learn my multidimensional approach to effectively treating the childhood trauma that is commonly at the roots of Complex PTSD. It can deeply aid therapists to mend the damage and arrested development that survivors experienced as traumatized children in the 'care' of abusive and/or neglectful parents or other caretakers.
This damage and developmental delay can be remediated when therapists and/or other supportive people use the guidance and techniques that are fleshed out in this book. Such practice has helped many of them to become highly effective, trauma-informed therapists.
The psychoeducational approach herein helps survivors see that their symptoms are normal child reactions to abnormal upbringings that are steeped in abuse and neglect, danger, and lovelessness.
With the therapists' help and compassion, this knowledge then aids them to develop self-compassion for their lifelong suffering.
When therapists successfully midwife the rebirth of survivors' innate self-compassion, they can then expand it into helping them reclaim their instincts of healthy self-protection."
"The price of emotional renunciation is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves us depressed and taciturn, imprisoned in the apathy and ennui of the 'Seen-that-Been-there-Done-that' syndrome. When we surrender and soften to our feelings, we reconnect with our inborn vitality, and with the invaluable instinct and intuition that our feelings naturally carry.
The Tao of Fully Feeling describes the middle ground of emotional aliveness that lies between emotional deadness and emotional explosiveness. It helps us to soften and relax into our feelings without exiling them or enshrining them. It guides us to be emotionally expressive in benign, intimacy-enhancing ways.
The Tao of Fully Feeling teaches us to respond to our painful and potentially disruptive feelings in healthy ways. It illustrates the enriching aspects of the so-called negative emotions, and helps us achieve the emotional flexibility whereby sadness easily mellows into solace, anger unfolds into laughter, fear evolves into excitement, jealousy opens up into appreciation, and blame gives way to forgiveness.
The Tao of Fully Feeling refutes the black-and-white notion that blame is never justifiable. It describes safe, non-destructive ways of feeling and expressing blame—ways that ironically enhance our capacity to feel genuine forgiveness.
When we authentically forgive our parents, we know what we are forgiving them for, and what specifically was blameworthy about their behavior in the first place. When we forgive before we blame, we risk dragging the full weight of our childhood hurt and anger around forever, like an exhausted backpacker who is too dulled and over-trusting to notice that someone has put a boulder in his/her pack."
"The causes of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder range from severe neglect to monstrous abuse. Many survivors grew up in houses that were not homes—in families that were as loveless as orphanages and sometimes as dangerous.
If you felt unwanted, unliked, rejected, hated, and/or despised for a lengthy portion of your childhood, trauma may be deeply engrained in your mind, soul, and body.
This book is a practical guide to recovering from lingering childhood trauma. It is copiously illustrated with examples of the author's and his clients' journeys of recovering. It is a comprehensive self-help guide for working through the toxic legacy of the past and for achieving a rich and fulfilling life."
