Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma - by Janina Fisher (Paperback)

About the Book

Janina Fisher has spent 40 years working with trauma survivors, helping them to navigate towards healing. In Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma, she shows how the symptom legacy helped them survive and offers healing strategies.

Book Synopsis

Traumatic experiences leave a "living legacy" of effects that often persist for years and decades after the events are over. Historically, it has always been assumed that re-telling the story of what happened would resolve these effects.

However, survivors report a different experience: Telling and re-telling the story of what happened to them often reactivates their trauma responses, overwhelming them rather than resolving the trauma. To transform traumatic experiences, survivors need to understand their symptoms and reactions as normal responses to abnormal events. They need ways to work with the symptoms that intrude on their daily activities, preventing a life beyond trauma.

Dr. Janina Fisher, international expert on trauma, has spent over 40 years working with survivors, helping them to navigate the healing journey. In Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma, she shows how the legacy of symptoms helped them survive and offers:

• Step-by-step strategies that can be used on their own or in collaboration with a therapist
• Simple diagrams that make sense of the confusing feelings and physical reactions survivors experience
• Worksheets to practice the skills that bring relief and ultimately healing

Review Quotes

"Reading Janina Fisher's wonderful, generous and beautifully written book reminds me of how much we, as a profession, have learned in only three short decades. This book beautifully articulates how mind and body adapt to intolerable feelings of terror, self-loathing and fear of abandonment with a range of ingenious solutions to create some semblance of safety and control. These adaptations endure over time, and eventually tend to interfere with having satisfying relationship with one's self and others. Janina shows us that healing traumatic wounds consists of learning new habits of observation and self-discovery. The goal of treatment is not so much digging up the past, but the repair of the injuries suffered as a result of traumatizing experiences. It's a marvelous and easily accessible work that should be part of every therapist's skill set."

--Bessel van der Kolk, MD, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Body Keeps the Score

"Written with her characteristic hopefulness and clarity, this workbook showcases Janina Fisher's unique gift of getting to the essence of things. Complex theories are transformed into simple, easily understood, useful concepts that teach clients to make sense of their symptoms, to befriend their coping strategies, and to practice effective skills to relieve their suffering. Most importantly, this book will inspire the confidence to realize that healing is possible for even the most traumatized survivor."

--Pat Ogden, PhD, author of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment and The Pocket Guide to Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

"In this succinct and well-organized volume, Janina Fisher distills the essence of modern trauma theory and the deep wisdom of her decades of clinical experience. The result is a welcome, reader-friendly primer for personal use or to support professional work with trauma survivors. "

--Gabor Maté, M.D., author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction

"This workbook is an extraordinary gift for therapists and clients alike. With her trademark compassion, Dr. Fisher succeeds in de-pathologizing and simplifying the complexities of the cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral residue of trauma."

--Lisa Ferentz, LCSW-C, author of Letting Go of Self-Destructive Behaviors: A Workbook of Hope and Healing

"Renowned trauma recovery pioneer, Janina Fisher offers a superb, user friendly, and comprehensive guide to healing for all trauma survivors and for therapists as well. Grounded in expert knowledge of neurobiological, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma walks readers step by step through an effective process of deep, lasting change, looking both at childhood injuries and at lifelong adaptations to them. Practical, smart, and wise, this book has the power to change your life."

--Terry Real, LICSW, author of The New Rules of Marriage and founder of the Relational Life Institute

"Janina Fisher and I have long followed parallel paths promoting greater attention to stabilization in trauma therapy. Here she furthers her careful, educational, common sense, and resource-rich approach, filling a much-neglected niche in the trauma self-help literature. Fisher successfully balances illuminating commonalities of post traumatic conditions while encouraging readers to select, portion, and pace individualized healing paths. This book provides an excellent adjunct to any course of trauma therapy or personal self-help."

--Babette Rothschild, MSW, LCSW, author of The Body Remembers, Vols. 1 & 2 (2000 & 2017) & 8 Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery (2010)