Eight Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery

Written in a friendly, caring style the book leaves no doubt about the well-meaning intentions of its author. Right in the Introduction she makes three strong points: that trauma recovery must improve the quality of life rather than worsen it, that getting one's trauma handled should not be any worse than receiving it in the first place, and that obvious as such standards may appear they are not adhered to in some practices of psychotherapy (Rothschild admits to having suffered herself from such treatment). Consequently, in order to protect her clients from being harmed by memories of old trauma, she flatly advises against any trauma recall. No need to, she claims. Because there are ways to live around contacting the actual cause of one's disturbance, namely the author's "eight keys to safe trauma recovery". In order to avoid being haunted by old trauma certain routines are established, some of which need building up to the level of rituals. If strictly followed, the trauma won't reawaken. Should there be a flashback, well, there are rituals to deal also with that. As a reader of this book one cannot quite avoid the impression that a traumatized person's life should be lived as if walking on eggs. The domination of the trauma is replaced by a different domination, that of the rituals, whilst paradoxically, through the sheer upholding of those routines, one perpetually reminds oneself that the old trauma is still lurking in the background. Admittedly this is intended to be a self-help book, and so one could look at it with a benign eye, saying "well, as long as it helps". Yet as the author herself, a professional therapist, follows those eight steps in all strictness, the reader feels entitled to ask if she is really doing her clients a favour with it? After all she spends up to a year with some cases, coaching them in the art of letting sleeping dogs lie, never to wake them up. Whereas alternatively one could simply ask a disturbed client: "Tell me what happened", and, giving him the compassion and the time necessary to help him get to the bottom of his experience, he will eventually be able to take it with ease (in the fairly light examples given in Rothschild's book, this could have been achieved in a mere matter of hours). It is certainly good advice to be mindful, to acknowledge the fact that one has survived, to establish rituals for holding off flashbacks (three of her eight keys), but is it really needed for this purpose that the client be explained the functions of his amygdala and his hippocampus in great detail, so that he hopefully can monitor their actions and hold the old trauma at bay? Not only the ethics but also the logic of this is certainly questionable: if amygdala and hippocampus at the time of the trauma were put out of proper function due to being flooded with stress, oneself being the helpless bystander, why then should that reverse all of a sudden? What should enable one, particularly at moments of heavy flashback, to jump out of one's role as a victim of one's own physiology, and take control over these unruly physiological agents? How come one should be in control now when in the original traumatic incident one was not? Also, setting the client's intellect up against his physiology is certainly no way to create inner peace. Rothschild does not appear to have a concept of humans as spiritual beings. Quite the contrary: being convinced that it is not the person who remembers but the body, and teaching her clients this, the author actively keeps her clients from exploring memories of times and places when that particular body wasn't present. She does not permit past lives, spirit attachments, or telepathic downloading from the collective unconscious to enter the equation (things which are openly discussed these days). To conclude: instead of making people look at the deeper cause of their problems Rothschild, in a very kind and caring way, does everything to make them avoid this. She advises one to pass one's life in a state of forever watchfulness with respect to any potential stimulus, and a preparedness to soothe the occasional flashback. A life of pussyfooting around. Is it worth living?