Repressive regimes, regardless of their nature and geographic location, have a destructive and dehumanizing effect on people’s lives. Oppression and political violence shatter victims’ identities, their relationships, communities and the meaning of their world as a safe and coherent place. However, while some people suffer traumatising long term effects, others become stronger and more resilient, able to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of tragedy. Reconstructing Trauma and Meaning is an invitation to revisit, bear witness and listen to the stories of suffering and healing of survivors of apartheid repression in South Africa. This work is an exploration of the life trajectories of former victims of gross human rights violations during apartheid and their creative ways of reconstructing meaning after trauma. Their life narratives, shaped by social, political and cultural realities, are a valuable contribution to the collective memory of the nation, as an intrinsic part of the continuous process of reconciliation and transformation in South Africa.

Reconstructing Meaning After Trauma: Theory, Research, and Practice informs actual therapeutic work with clients who present with traumas or other life disruptions by providing clinicians with information on the construction of meaning. It includes material on diverse mechanisms of clinical change and positive-promoting processes. The book covers identifiable treatments and specific lines of research in assisting clients in developing new meaning, such as posttraumatic growth (after sexual assault, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer, destructive natural phenomena, such as hurricanes, and refugee experiences), and finding benefit (in the context of loss—loss of health, or loss of a loved one). Addresses a specific treatment or line of research Includes extended case vignettes at the beginning of each chapter Describes the associated theoretical background for each method Summarizes the research supporting each mechanism Concludes with a discussion of future directions for treatment, research, and theory

People--laymen and practitioners alike--face serious difficulties in making sense of each other's feelings, behavior, and discourse in everyday life and after traumatic experiences. Acknowledging and working through these difficulties is the subject of this extremely interesting and highly readable book. After a critical look at the psychological and philosophical literature, Dan Bar-On identifies two groups of impediments. First, the indescribable, as it appears when individuals try to understand and integrate their first heart attack into their previous life-experience, when a group of pathfinders talk about their different maps of the mind and nature, or when a team of welfare practitioners tries to develop a common approach to their regional population. Second, the undiscussable, as it appears in the transmission, from generation to generation, of the traumatic experiences of the families of both Holocaust survivors and Nazi perpetrators, the book showing how their descendants can work through the burden of the past by confronting themselves and each other through a prolonged group encounter. This book provides a unique way of looking at life experiences, individual as well as inter-personal. It proposes a new psychological theoretical framework in a way to which both laymen and professionals can relate while confronting similar issues in their everyday experiences and discourse. The book is of especial relevance to present-day Central and East European societies, relating as it does to the problems of psychological adaptation arising from the transition from totalitarian to democratic regimes.

In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score). Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.

A prominent theme presented in this volume is that symptoms in the bereaved individual have meaning-making significance and that meaning reconstruction in response to loss is the central process in grieving. More scientifically oriented readers will find comprehensive discussions of research programs supporting these tenets, particularly those linking grief with responses to loss involved in trauma. Practitioners will find clinically informed models and ample case descriptions to bridge concepts with real people suffering real loss. All will find new paradigms for approaching loss and reconstruction of meaning in a respectful, revealing way that has significance both personally and professionally. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

Posttraumatic Growth reworks and overhauls the seminal 2006 Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth. It provides a wide range of answers to questions concerning knowledge of posttraumatic growth (PTG) theory, its synthesis and contrast with other theories and models, and its applications in diverse settings. The book starts with an overview of the history, components, and outcomes of PTG. Next, chapters review quantitative, qualitative, and cross-cultural research on PTG, including in relation to cognitive function, identity formation, cross-national and gender differences, and similarities and differences between adults and children. The final section shows readers how to facilitate optimal outcomes with PTG at the level of the individual, the group, the community, and society.

This book investigates the psychology of victimization. It shows how fundamental assumptions about the world's meaningfulness and benevolence are shattered by traumatic events, and how victims become subject to self-blame in an attempt to accommodate brutality. The book is aimed at all those who for personal or professional reasons seek to understand what psychological trauma is and how to recover from it.