Relational and Body-Centered Practices for Healing Trauma. Lifting the Burdens of the Past 2nd Edition

Relational and Body-Centered Practices for Healing Trauma provides psychotherapists and other helping professionals with a groundbreaking body-based model for treating trauma. The second edition includes new principles and healing practices to address different forms of individual and collective trauma, including climate instability, colonization, the global pandemic, and political unrest. The chapters expand on body-based relational practices to help individuals and communities embody ancient ways of knowing and respond to adversity with vitality, empathy, and love.

The book combines research in neuroscience and phenomenology, extensive clinical therapeutic experience, knowledge gained from training thousands of students, and collaboration with Indigenous people and traditional societies around the globe. With cross-cultural wisdom, Dr. Stanley delves into aspects of somatic therapy and cultural healing, including:

• Key elements of relational empathy, such as bracketing biases while allowing one’s presence to connect with others, the self, and spiritual understanding
• The role of homeostasis in healing, which vitalizes recovery from psychological, social, cognitive, and spiritual dimensions of trauma
• How collective trauma can be effectively healed through relational community support

This new edition helps readers deepen and expand their understanding and practice of somatic healing to transform not just their practice but also their connection with others and themselves.

CONTENTS

1. Trauma and Embodied Relational Therapy

2. Structures and Functions of the Body-Mind-Brain, Homeostasis, and the Polyvagal Theory of Autonomic Functioning

3. Good News! The Brain Can Change!

4. Embodiment: Coming Home to Our Bodies

5. With Trauma, “the Spirit Leaves the Body”

6. Somatic Awareness: The Truth of the Mind Begins in the Body

7. Somatic Empathy: Encounters of the “Living Body” With Another “Living Body”

8. Somatic Inquiry: Exploring the Intersubjective World

9. Somatic Interventions for Regulating Neural-Emotional States

10. Somatic Interventions with Imagination and Dreams

11. Somatic Reflections

12. The Old/New Paradigm for Healing Trauma Appendix: The Practice of Somatic Transformation Index