This supportive workbook helps trauma survivors find and use crucial skills for coping, self-understanding, and self-care.

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Trauma can turn a person's world upside down--afterward, nothing may look safe or familiar. This supportive workbook helps trauma survivors find and use crucial skills for coping, self-understanding, and self-care. Even when the worst has happened, this book shows how it is possible to feel good again. Filled with comforting activities, relaxation techniques, self-evaluation questionnaires, and exercises, the workbook explains how and why trauma can throw you for a loop and what survivors can do now to cope. Chapters guide readers step-by-step toward reclaiming a basic sense of safety, self-worth, and control over their lives, as well as the capacity to trust and be close to others. Readers learn how to protect themselves from overwhelming memories and to heal from trauma-related reactions that may be disturbing their day-to-day lives. Written by experts in treating trauma and based on extensive research, the workbook can be used on its own or in conjunction with psychotherapy.

Table of Contents

1. After Trauma: Why You Feel Thrown for a Loop
   What is trauma?
   Common reactions to trauma
   Supportive relationships can change following trauma
   Checking in with yourself
   Learning to relax

   Ways of Coping After the Trauma

   Trauma can disrupt how you cope

   Identifying your ways of coping

   Guidelines for coping effectively with stress

   Coping with negative feelings

   Staying safe out in the world

   Time out to relax

   Thinking Things Through

   Making sense of your posttrauma reactions

   Making sense of beliefs

   Tracking reactions to there source in changes beliefs

   Thinking through a belief

   Weighing the evidence of what you believe

   Feeling Safe; Being Safe

   How safety can be an issue after trauma

   What can safety mean?

   Dimensions of safety

   What does safety mean to you?

   Sorting out facts about safety from your reactions

   Strategies for protecting yourself

   Do you feel safe enough?

   Tracking reactions to beliefs about safety

   Thinking through a belief about safety

   Weighting the evidence on beliefs about safety

   Summarizing your work on safety

   What Does It Mean to Trust?

   How trust can be an issue after trauma

   What can trust mean?

   What can trust mean to you?

   Sorting out facts about trust from reactions

   Thinking through beliefs about trust

   Weighing the evidence on beliefs about trust

   Summarizing your work on trust

   Regaining Control in Your Life

   How control and power can be issues after trauma

   What can it mean to be powerful and in control?

   What do power and control mean to you?

   Sorting out facts about power and control from your reactions

   Do you have enough control in your life?

   Tracking reactions to beliefs about power and control

   Weighing the evidence on beliefs about power and control

   Valuing Yourself and Others

   How trauma con affect self-esteem

   What can value and esteem mean?

   What does self-esteem mean to you?

   Intimacy: Getting Close to Others

   How intimacy can be an issue after trauma

   What can intimacy mean?

   What does intimacy mean to you? Epilogue: Healing for the Long Term

   Coping with Stress

   Getting Stronger

   Towards a greater meaning

   • Appendices: A. Suggested Readings and Resources B. About Psychotherapy C. Letter to Professionals