Books about Trauma Therapy &
Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing™

1. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (1997)
2. Healing Trauma: Restoring the Wisdom of the Body (Audio-1999)
3. It Won't Hurt Forever: Guiding Your Child Through Trauma (Audio-2001)
4. Victims of Cruelty: Somatic Psychotherapy in the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (2000)
5. Sexual Healing: Transforming the Sacred Wound (Audio-2003)
6. Panic: Origins, Insight, and Treatment (2002)
7. Somatic Trauma Therapy » The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment (2000)

Waking the Tiger : Healing Trauma : The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences
by Peter A. Levine, Ann Frederick (Contributor)

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Reader Reviews
An excellent book about dealing with trauma, April 20, 2003
Reviewer: Lawrence Tunis from San Rafael, CA USA
Peter Levine in "Waking the Tiger," postulates that trauma exists not in the event or in the story of the event, but is stored within the nervous system. Many common physical ailments are actually residues of thwarted trauma reactions incurred during such events as surgical procedures, falls, pre or perinatal stress and/or childhood accidents and traumas. The body has a natural, innate, and miraculous capacity to heal once these reactions are understood and guided.

Levine reinforces the holistic nature of the human being. Our bodies and brains connect instinct, emotion and rationality to our experience. Trauma may create damaging and often enduring symptoms. Human beings have a harder time than do animals in releasing trauma and may carry it throughout our lives. We often become frozen in trauma, unlike animals that can cope with the unpredictability of nature. This may provide a major interference with our health, peace of mind and the ability to live joyfully and creatively. When human trauma remains unhealed, the energy of the trauma and accompanying emotions remain locked within the brain and held within the body's musculature, tissues and organs, awaiting discharge.

The author writes about an oft-forgotten aspect of trauma, freezing or immobilization during a traumatic experience. Modern medicine/psychiatry emphasize the "flight or fight" response while often neglecting the freeze response. The concept of the freeze response in the face of overwhelming threat provides a missing link to symptoms such as dissociation that our old ideas of "fight or flight" fail to explain. Immobilization in the face of threat is an automatic biological response that is not voluntarily chosen by the victim. This provides redeeming message to trauma survivors.

Levine points out that our memories are not literal recordings of events, but rather, a complex of images that are influenced by arousal, emotional context, and prior experience. Memories may even transform over time as new experiences add layers of meaning to the images. While remembering the past can be an important aspect of therapy, appreciating the subjective quality of memories is crucial to integrating them appropriately into the healing process.

Those with deep psychological scars may have dissociated the memory from their minds and are living in a numbed, tensed body awaiting its release so the body can return to wholeness and optimum mental and physical health. The author asserts that psychological wounds are reversible and that healing comes when the physical and mental letting go occurs, similar to the way the tiger experiences the coming and going of threat, tensing in response to danger, and as the threat passes, the tiger's muscles shake, twitch and let go right then and there the fear related energy which now is forever out of mind and body. Trauma is stored energy that must be released.


Brilliant!, April 24, 2003
Reviewer: A reader from NY, United States
If you have trauma and/or PTSD you simply must but this book. I know you have probably been searching for a long time and dealing with feelings of isolation and invalidation like myself. This book will give you serious validation and tools to further and complete your healing. The tapes by Levine are great too, they give you even more concrete steps. I can honestly say that in all the years of searching for someone or something to help and validate me this book and the tapes have been the only thing. You will see the truth about trauma and what I believe you probably knew already on some level especially if you have been trying like hell to understand your symptoms and what is wrong with you. Guess what? There is nothing wrong with you. Trauma is a natural human reaction that makes you feel alot of shame, pain and anguish but you can heal.
I could go on about the book but I don't want to ruin it. Buy it. I know I will and can heal, I have made much sucess and you will too!!

P.S. To all of you therapists that charge so much money for attempting to heal people from trauma I'd like to say that statisticly most people with ptsd don't have alot of money or are on assistance so you might want to re-think why you are a therapist or of ways to provide help to all. Is it to make money or to help people If you really want to help people then why don't you organize a group and all come together and make it possible instead of refusing but another potential client and well potential healer for that matter. I mean people if the majority of trauma survivors cannot afford your costs what the hell are you doing! With all due respect of course. $$$

Trauma Survivors: buy the book we need you!

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Healing Trauma: Restoring the Wisdom of the Body
by Peter A. Levine (Reader)

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Description
A Complete Course in Healing Trauma Through Your Body

Are you experiencing physical or emotional symptoms that no one is able to explain? If so, you may be suffering a traumatic reaction to a past event, teaches Dr. Peter A. Levine. Medical researchers have known for decades that survivors of accidents, disaster, and childhood trauma often endure life-long symptoms ranging from anxiety and depression to unexplained physical pain and harmful "acting out" behaviors. As a young stress researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, Levine found that all animals, including humans, are born with a natural ability to rebound from these distressing situations.

On Healing Trauma, this respected therapist and teacher brings you face to face with his effective new treatment – not a "talking" cure, but a deep physiological process for releasing your past traumas and instilling a harmonious awareness of your body. Drawing on nature’s lessons, Dr. Levine teaches you each of the essential principles of his four-phase process. You will learn how and where you are storing unresolved distress; how to become more aware of your body's physiological responses to danger; and specific methods to free yourself from trauma.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, over 23 million Americans suffer from anxiety disorders – many as a direct result of trauma. Now, you can learn how to address these and other symptoms at their source – your body – and return to the natural trauma-free state that you were meant to live in. Over nine hours of instruction to free yourself from trauma through your body’s built-in healing process. This program includes a 24-page study guide.

LEARN MORE ABOUT:
- A revolutionary method for releasing trauma, taught step by step
- Nature's lessons – the physiological roots of your emotions
- How to determine if you are suffering the effects of trauma
- Where trauma hides in your body and how to release it
- Specific exercises to "thaw" frozen physiological energies
- Coping with surgeries, accidents, illnesses, and other stressful events
- Emergency "first-aid" measures for emotional distress.


About the Author
Peter A.Levine received his Ph.D. in medical and biological physics from the University of California at Berkeley, and holds a doctorate in psychology from International University. During his 35-year study of stress and trauma, he has contributed to scientific and medical publications and served as a consultant for NASA's space shuttle project. He has taught at the Hopi Guidance Center and at hospitals and pain clinics throughout the world. Dr. LEvine is currently a consultant for the Pain Rehabilitation Center in Boulder, CO, and he teaches frequently throughout the U.S. and Europe. He is the co-author, with Ann Frederick, of the book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, as well as the audio program It Won't Hurt Forever: Guiding Your Child Through Trauma.

Reader Review
Refreshing insights, March 12, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from FL United States
These tapes are for everyone. He addresses heavy duty physical trauma as well as everyday stress. It incorporates past and present experience. This audio cassette draws on meditations that I have become used to from psychology, but the wonderful difference is the author's explanation of trauma in biological terms. Animals have natural responses to stress and attack. (I particularly was interested in his explanation of immobilization as a biological defense.) Animals also have natural ways of coming out of trauma. I now have a biological context for what I once only knew as abstract psychological truths. I understand my own personal immobilization as a healthy biological defense rather than as some sort of psychic deficiency. Understanding this helps me come out of immobilization at a physical level. I am grateful to these cassettes for this insight.

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It Won't Hurt Forever: Guiding Your Child Through Trauma
by Peter Levine

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Description
How do you help your child recover and grow from life’s painful experiences?

Your child has just experienced a distressing event – a bicycle fall, a medical procedure, a frightening encounter with a dog. What do you do? Most of us would try to comfort the child, and then hope for the best. “There is more you can do than just hope,” teaches Peter Levine. On this audio program, Dr. Levine offers his 35 years of expertise in healing emotional traumas to show you a better way to help your child.

Stress researchers now know that after a painful or fearful experience, children may endure such symptoms as unexplainable stomach aches, pains, nightmares, bedwetting, nervousness, aggression, distractibility, and other problems. Why? “Because all animal, including humans, possess a natural physiological process for discharging the energy of such experiences,” explains Dr. Levine. “When that process is thwarted, a child may suffer long after the event.” Now, with this groundbreaking audio-learning program for parents and caretakers, you can gain the skills you need to help a child recover from frightening events in a healthier, more natural way – using the body’s own healing mechanisms.

Children possess the innate ability to respond and recover from potentially traumatic circumstances. With It Won’t Hurt Forever, you will learn how to activate this priceless resource within any child in need. Includes 18-page parents guide and ten full-color illustrations. An original learning program available only in audio format.

From the Publisher
The ability to heal is innate, making the adult's role simple: it is to help children access their own ability to recover. This is similar in any ways to the function of a band-aid or a splint. The band-aid or splint doesn't heal the wound, but protects it, and supports the body in restoring itself. When appropriately guided, children will grow stronger and will have an increased immunity from the effects of future potential traumas. The suggestions provided here are meant to enable adults to be good "band-aids" for children.

How to use this audio learning set:
It is suggested that you first listen to the two audiotapes without your child. This will give you a broad idea of the nature of trauma in children, and provide you with various things that you can do to help prevent traumatic symptoms from developing in children after stressful events. It also explains how to help children regain balance and resilience after traumatization. Next, it is suggested that you read the provided parent's guide as a review and so that you will know how to best use the final section of the program to help guide your child with the spoken rhymes and fold-out pictures. Finally, to offer best support for your child as you work with the rhymes, it is important to take time to study the verses and the corresponding instructions prior to listening together. This way you will be ready for the various possible responses from your child - and better in control of your own reactions.

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Victims of Cruelty: Somatic Psychotherapy in the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
by Maryanna Eckberg, Peter Levine

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Reader Review
Not for clients of the therapy, May 23, 2001
Reviewer: ANNE-ELIZABETH HAWLEY (see more about me at Amazon.com) from PORTLAND, OR USA
I read "Victims of Cruelty" as both a client and a student of Somatic Experiencing™, at the recommendation of my SE therapist. Eckberg gives some clear and fascinating insights into the value of somatic therapies for sufferers of PTSD, with a particular emphasis on her own specialty, victims of political and other forms of torture. The explicit conclusions she draws are hopeful and uplifting. The implicit conclusion, however, is not.

As a student of the work, I found the book less technical than I would have hoped--it seems aimed at a lay audience, and yet the emphasis on fairly unusual and extreme forms of trauma makes it too specialized for general interest or "self-help." Eckberg mentions but does not elaborate on the specifics of her clinical methods.

As a client of the work, I found the book distressing and even frightening: one of Eckberg's most haunting and memorable client cases, and then Eckberg herself, developed cancer at the successful conclusion of trauma therapy, and both eventually died of it. The book, published after Eckberg's death, seems to say that a natural outgrowth of recovery from a lifetime of PTSD is to find peace and then die. This would NOT be a message I'd want to give clients struggling to recover from trauma.

"Victims of Cruelty," therefore, stands as an interesting narrative of one woman's journey as a trauma victim and a healer, but failed to teach me much as a healer and actually detracted from my work as a client.

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Sexual Healing: Transforming the Sacred Wound
by Peter A. Levine

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Panic: Origins, Insight, and Treatment
by Brooke Warner (Editor), Peter A. Levine (Foreword)

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Description
Panic is not a single state with only one set of feelings and predictable emotions. The essays and articles in this book span various disciplines — psychology, medicine, literature, and history — tied together by the common thread of panic, including how it is manifested in culture, tradition, and experience, and its differing treatments. Included are original as well as previously published writings by Peter A. Levine, Paul Pitchford, and Kim Newman.

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