Book Summary

In my work as a clinician, a teacher, supervisor, and a writer in dialogue with an audience online, I’ve personally observed the deep need people have to understand the difficulties that they, and those around them, are dealing with. I’ve observed that there is a growing obsession with discovering whether one’s life experiences qualify as “traumatic,” making them officially “traumatized.” But millions of people get reduced or skewed  information, get misinformed, or simply ask the wrong questions; explaining and normalizing human experience with a deep understanding of what our bodies and brains do if we let them go on their own could be a great contribution to the betterment of mental health for all.

I was motivated by the common doubts that individuals have around the construct of trauma, but especially by the scenarios that trauma clinicians confront every day. Clinicians themselves are often unclear about whether the client that talks about their extreme adversity (or ‘childhood trauma’) actually suffers from a disorder, and don’t always know how to deliver the correct trauma treatment due to a lack on how to conceptualize the presentation or guidance on assessing the depth of the wound. My goal is to provide both clinicians and non-clinicians with the right level of validation, specificity, preventive measures, clear methodology, assessment tools, and healing facts that have not been integrated before. 

In order to create clarity, and move beyond the “PTSD” diagnosis, Traumatization and Its Aftermath contextualizes different traumatic circumstances according to the age of exposure, social context, and intensity/gravity of the adversities and occurrences. Using a bio-psycho-social approach, the book distributes the accountability for developing a disorder among all the factors that intervene, or what I refer to as “traumatizing agents.” The book is specifically written to offer practical solutions for anyone and to shift the tone around trauma to one focused on progress and healing.   

Featuring a central fictional multicultural character and several people that surround her life, the in-depth explanations become alive as the reader can relate to the experiences of the protagonists; they add relatability and richness to the “dry” task of looking for answers to a complex disorder. The text throughout  also includes colorful case studies, anecdotes, and observations, and the epilogue dives into circumstances that explain my own struggle with traumatization and its aftermath.

Traumatization and Its Aftermath straddles the line between textbook and self-help guide to starting a new, more educated conversation about the trauma phenomena, exploring what living in fear and defeat does to the mind and body, guiding the reader through an inclusive, progressive narrative of elements needed to recover one’s life.