Relational and Body-Centered Practices for Healing Trauma: Lifting the Burdens of the Past
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : March 2025
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 286
- Category :
Trauma and Violence - Category 2 :
Forthcoming - Catalogue No : 97971
- ISBN 13 : 9781032717661
- ISBN 10 : 1032717661
Also by Sharon Stanley
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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.
Reviews and Endorsements
Sharon Stanley shares her embodied-relational approach to psychotherapy by grounding clinical examples and somatic exercises in both current neuroscience and ancestral wisdom. She highlights the importance of empathic attunement and embodied consciousness in the treatment of individual and collective trauma. Sharon helps us all become more embodied and empathic therapists, teachers, and parents. Her book is a gift to the trauma field—emphasizing our shared humanity and vitality—and a must-read for students in counseling, social work, and psychology graduate programs.
Christine Payne, PhD, licensed clinical psychologist
Relational and Body-Centered Practices for Healing Trauma is a remarkably compelling blend of interdisciplinary theory and applied case material. The science is accurate, and the clinical material is absorbing. Sharon Stanley’s integration of anthropological and cultural material with relational body techniques is unique. This book will have an indelible impact on the field.
Allan Schore, author of Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self and The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy
This second edition of Sharon Stanley’s Relational and Body-Centered Practices for Healing Trauma adds to the wisdom of the first edition, incorporating ancestral wisdom and addressing collective trauma. The book is an excellent resource for every clinician with its in-depth descriptions of therapeutic interventions. Holistic trauma healing takes place within the authentic embodied presence of others who offer relational support for somatic healing. Stanley is such a good writer and explainer of brain and body systems that laypeople can benefit from her insights as well. Highly recommended!
Darcia Narvaez, author of Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom
As a clinical-community psychologist with a rural Indigenous emphasis, I have found that Dr. Sharon Stanley’s work is undeniably culturally responsive for working with Indigenous peoples due to the basic understanding that we are human beings. Her work emulates our tribal values around respect, holding each other up, and having strength and courage. She so beautifully interweaves work about the human body and nervous system together with natural elements such as the land and water, which our Alaska Native peoples have been connected to and dependent on for thousands of years. She teaches human beings how to heal within and reconnect with self while becoming embodied. Mostly, she does this work in a manner that is inviting and safe for those who have experienced trauma individually and collectively. She is a beautiful spirit!
Tina Woods, clinical-community psychologist
Table of 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
About the Author(s)
Sharon Stanley, PhD, is a dynamic educator and psychotherapist who has taught creative practices for healing trauma to therapists and Indigenous people throughout the world.
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