A mind-body workbook for healing and overcoming Complex PTSD

Those affected by complex PTSD, or C-PTSD, commonly feel as though there is something fundamentally wrong with them--that somewhere inside there is a part of them that needs to be fixed. Facing one's PTSD is a brave, courageous act--and with the right guidance, recovery is possible.

In The Complex PTSD Workbook, you'll learn all about C-PTSD and gain valuable insight into the types of symptoms associated with unresolved childhood trauma. Take healing into your own hands while applying strategies to help integrate positive beliefs and behaviors.

Discover your path to recovery with:

• Examples and exercises--Uncover your own instances of trauma with PTSD activities designed to teach you positive strategies.
• Expert guidance--Explore common PTSD diagnoses and common methods of PTSD therapy including somatic therapy, CBT, and mind-body perspectives.
• Prompts and reflections--Apply the strategies you've learned and identify PTSD symptoms with insightful writing prompts.

Find the tools you need to work through C-PTSD and regain emotional control with this mind-body workbook.

A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD contains research-based strategies, tools, and support for individuals working to heal from their childhood trauma. You don't have to be a prisoner of your past.

Repetitive trauma during childhood can impact your emotional development, creating a ripple effect that carries into adulthood. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) is a physical and psychological response to these repeated traumatic events.

Learn the skills necessary to improve your physical and mental health with practical strategies taken from the most effective therapeutic methods, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), and somatic psychology. When appropriately addressed, the wounds of your past no longer need to interfere with your ability to live a meaningful and satisfying life.

This book will have you:

• Understanding C-PTSD--Get an in-depth explanation of complex PTSD, including its symptoms, its treatment through various therapies, and more.
• Addressing your symptoms--Discover evidence-based strategies for healing the symptoms of complex PTSD, like avoidance, depression, emotional dysregulation, and hopelessness.
• Relating to real stories--Relate to others' experiences with complex PTSD with multiple real-life examples included in each chapter.

Let go of the pain from your past with A Practical Guide to Complex PTSD!

Clinicians working with complex trauma are honored with the most sacred of tasks: to bear witness to clients' suffering and to attend compassionately to their wounds.

In The Complex PTSD Treatment Manual, clinicians will find the road map they need to conduct successful therapy with clients who have experienced prolonged exposure to traumatic events. Combining the science and art of therapy, Dr. Arielle Schwartz seamlessly integrates research-based interventions with the essentials of healing to create a whole-person approach to trauma treatment.

Drawing from her years of experience in working with trauma survivors, Dr. Schwartz provides clinicians with the tools they need to become a trustworthy companion to trauma survivors and become capable of guiding a healing journey for clients with a history of abuse or neglect. Within these pages, you will find:

• Essential interventions that strengthen mindful body awareness, enhance distress tolerance, cultivate self-compassion, and facilitate trauma recovery
• Over 50 practices, worksheets, and self-regulation points to utilize in each stage of the client's therapeutic process
• Integration of several therapeutic approaches for trauma treatment, including relational therapy, mindful body awareness, parts work therapy, CBT, EMDR, somatic psychology, and practices drawn from complementary and alternative medicine

Traumatic life experiences can be devastating and they inevitably shape who you are. Such events can also become a powerful force that awakens you to an undercurrent of your own aliveness. Trauma recovery involves learning to trust in your capacity for new growth. In order to grow, we must make use of our suffering in order to find our happiness.

Within these pages, you will find an invitation to see yourself as the hero or heroine of your own life journey. A hero's journey involves walking into the darkness on a quest for wholeness. This interactive format calls for journaling and self-reflection, with practices that guide you beyond the pain of your past and help you discover a sense of meaning and purpose in your life. Successful navigation of a hero's journey provides opportunities to discover that you are more powerful than you had previously realized.

Written by Dr. Arielle Schwartz, bestselling author of The Complex PTSD Workbook, this healing guide provides a step-by-step approach to trauma recovery that integrates:

• Mindfulness & yoga
• Somatic psychology
• EMDR therapy
• Parts work therapy
• Relational therapy

Yet, so often, the focus of healing involves retelling the story of the past without addressing the physiological imbalances that trauma leaves in its wake.

Therapeutic Yoga for Trauma Recovery bridges this path of healing between the psyche and the body by walking you through the sacred practice of yoga so you can release the burdens of trauma from your body and mind.

Grounded within the principles of polyvagal theory, affective neuroscience, and trauma-informed care, this book will help you gain a better understanding of how our brains and bodies respond to stress and trauma and offer a self-led healing journey toward feeling more empowered, grounded, clearheaded, inspired, and at ease.

With her innately compassionate and gentle guidance, Dr. Arielle Schwartz introduces you to the power of the yogic philosophy and offers a variety of accessible yoga poses and breathing practices that will allow you to:

• Nourish your nervous system
• Reconnect with your body
• Ground yourself in the present moment
• Release unresolved patterns of fight, flight, freeze, or faint
• Widen your ability to tolerate emotional discomfort
• Develop a felt sense of resilience
• Anchor yourself in self-love
• Reclaim connection with and trust in your body
• Create a personalized yoga practice for your own self-care

Iggy The Incredible Ice Cream tells the story of an ice cream who dares to be different from his friends. He longs to stand out instead of being just a plain vanilla ice cream. This desire leads him to visit a special ice cream store to turn into a fabulous sundae. However, once this transformation is complete, Iggy becomes very conceited. After some time, a traumatic event ruins Iggy's new look and humbles him. This book celebrates individuality, loving yourself, and the beauty that lies within each of us.

Follow Rio on Instagram for more great artwork!

@rio.teix

Rewire your nervous system for lasting calm, connection, and resilience with cutting-edge, polyvagal theory-based activities.

Whether you've suffered a single traumatic experience or faced repeated difficult life events, you can be left feeling hypervigilant, irritable, and disconnected. Daily tasks like attending a work meeting or social gathering can feel overwhelming or even frightening. Most therapies for treating trauma require you to revisit your traumatic experience in potentially triggering ways. In this cutting-edge workbook, best-selling author and trauma expert Arielle Schwartz provides a practical, body-based method to help you treat your trauma symptoms--without reliving your trauma or being exposed to triggers.

The Polyvagal Theory Workbook for Trauma offers evidence-based activities to help you heal the effects of trauma, rewire your nervous system, and return to a state of balance and calm. You'll begin by getting to know your nervous system, including an exploration of polyvagal theory and the vagus nerve. You'll also learn soothing, body-based practices to help you rewire your nervous response, including rhythmic movements (EMDR and tapping), conscious breathing, mindful movement, and more. Self-reflection and journaling prompts will help you get the most out of every chapter, and a comprehensive collection of tools will help you stay on the path to trauma recovery.

You don't have to relive your trauma in order to heal. With this powerful workbook, you can take charge of your mental health, build resilience, and feel safer and more connected.

This book focuses on the intersection of polyvagal theory, yoga, and psychotherapy by weaving together the wisdom tradition of yoga with neuroscience, attachment theory, somatic psychology, and traumatology. The application of polyvagal theory allows practitioners to compassionately support growth by enhancing the health of the autonomic nervous system, while therapeutic yoga allows one to attend to the interrelationships between mind, emotions, physiology, and behavior.

Applied Polyvagal Theory in Yoga provides conscious breathing, vagal toning, mindful movement, and meditation practices that aid in rewiring the nervous system. Readers will discover how to help both clients and themselves cultivate a felt sense of ease during times of safety; enhance their capacity to handle challenges with equanimity; and reclaim their ability to recover from stress swiftly and efficiently. Applied Polyvagal Theory in Yoga offers practitioners a new and effective way to support clients who are stuck in a trauma response mode.

Clients who have experienced traumatic events and seek EMDR therapists rely on them as guides through their most vulnerable moments. Trauma leaves an imprint on the body, and if clinicians don't know how to stay embodied in the midst of these powerful relational moments, they risk shutting down with their clients or becoming overwhelmed by the process. If the body is not integrated into EMDR therapy, full and effective trauma treatment is unlikely.

This book offers an integrative model of treatment that teaches therapists how to increase the client's capacity to sense and feel the body, helps the client work through traumatic memories in a safe and regulated manner, and facilitates lasting integration.

Part I (foundational concepts) offers a broad discussion of theory and science related to trauma treatment. Readers will be introduced to essential components of EMDR therapy and somatic psychology. The discussion then deepens into the science of embodiment through the lens of research on emotion, memory, attachment, interpersonal neurobiology, and the impact of trauma on overall health. This part of the book emphasizes the principles of successful trauma treatment as phase-oriented, mindfulness-based, noninterpretive, experiential, relational, regulation focused, and resilience-informed.

Part II (interventions) presents advanced scripted protocols that can be integrated into the eight phases of EMDR therapy. These interventions provide support for therapists and clients who want to build somatic awareness through experiential explorations that incorporate mindfulness of sensations, movement impulses, breath, and boundaries.

Other topics discussed include a focus on complex PTSD and attachment trauma, which addresses topics such as working with preverbal memories, identifying ego states, and regulating dissociation; chronic pain or illness; and culturally-based traumatic events. Also included is a focused model of embodied self-care to prevent compassion fatigue and burnout.

Those affected by complex PTSD commonly feel as though there is something fundamentally wrong with them - that somewhere inside there is a part of them that needs to be fixed. Though untrue, such beliefs can feel extremely real and frightening. Difficult as it may be, facing one's PTSD from unresolved childhood trauma is a brave, courageous act - and with the right guidance, healing from PTSD is possible.

Clinical psychologist Dr Arielle Schwartz has spent years helping those with C-PTSD find their way to wholeness. She also knows the territory of the healing firsthand, having walked it herself. This book provides a map to the complicated, and often overwhelming, terrain of C-PTSD with Dr. Schwartz's knowledgeable guidance helping you find your way.

In The Complex PTSD Workbook, you'll learn all about C-PTSD and gain valuable insight into the types of symptoms associated with unresolved childhood trauma, while applying a strength-based perspective to integrate positive beliefs and behaviours.

Examples and exercises through which you'll discover your own instances of trauma through relating to PTSD experiences other than your own, such as the following:

* Information about common PTSD misdiagnoses such as bipolar disorder, ADHD, anxiety disorders, major depressive disorder, and substance abuse, among others.

* Explorations of common methods of PTSD therapy including somatic therapy, EMDR, CBT, DBT, and mind-body perspectives.

* Chapter takeaways that encourage thoughtful consideration and writing to explore how you feel as you review the material presented in relation to your PTSD symptoms.

The Complex PTSD Workbook aims to empower you with a thorough understanding of the psychology and physiology of C-PTSD so you can make informed choices about the path to healing that is right for you and discover a life of wellness, free of C-PTSD, that used to seem just out of reach.