Will I love Trauma and Recovery?

This was by far the most essential book in supporting my healing. Reading it at age 45, eight years into my recovery, so many times Herman described the exact thing I was either going through or had to go through to recover.

Explaining that being abused in a family was like being a prisoner of war blew my mind. Like a POW, seven-year-old me couldn’t escape. She helped explain so much of my trauma, my reactions, and my struggle and gave me a mountain of hope to climb!

In my view this book is an excellent example of how to understand the trauma caused by abuse at any age and in any circumstance and how it can devastate a person, can destroy them.

A particularly long-lasting and devastating impact is clear to see when it happens in childhood and in the family where most abuse occurs. I am aware of the significance of the model described by Judith with its stages of recovery. It is the basis of how The Woman’s Service I talk about in my book was developed by Maggie Schaedel.

It is the model Hilary… show more.

Dr. Judith Herman, whose trauma seminar I was privileged to audit while I was struggling with my own initially vague memories of childhood sexual abuse, is an extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive author.

A physician by training, she has worked in the field of sexual trauma for over half a century. In her classic book Trauma and Recover, Dr. Herman synthesizes years of research and analysis into an easy-to-read narrative form. One of her most compelling findings is how in both the individual and in history, trauma is subject to forgetting and remembering.

A feminist, she has always listened carefully… show more.

When I was trying to understand my own childhood trauma, Dr. Judith Herman's trauma and recovery made the most sense to me. The study of trauma, she wrote, has a curious history. Not only individuals, but entire societies have alternated between periods of remembering and periods of forgetting. Judith Herman was trained as a physician and came into contact with patients who had been sexually abused as a psychiatric resident. Her ability to integrate history, medicine, psychology, feminism, and literature into her book was indispensable to me.

Shame, secrecy, and silence, she wrote, were the deadly trio that prolonged the… show more.