Healing Developmental Trauma: A Systems Approach to Counseling Individuals, Couples, and Families

Description

This book is out of print.

Healing Developmental Trauma, the product of twenty-five years of research by Drs. Janae and Barry Weinhold, expands the field of traumatology to include Developmental Shock and Developmental Stress. The authors are licensed mental health practitioners and former faculty members at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.

This book not only examines the role of unhealed early childhood shock, trauma or stress as causes of mental illnesses and degenerative diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease, but provides an integrative systems-approach for healing them.

Many people use the words shock, trauma and stress interchangeably without realizing that they are actually very different categories of extreme emotional experiences that delay not only social and emotional development but also physical development. For this reason, the Weinholds refer to these states as developmental shock, developmental trauma and developmental stress.

This book places these three states on a trauma continuum that shows how each has discrete behavioral symptoms, involves different parts of the brain, activates different parts of the autonomic nervous system and has different orientations to time. Most importantly, this book describes the appropriate kinds of treatment interventions for each state for practitioners in the fields of mental health counseling, social work, marriage and family therapy, pre- and perinatal psychology, developmental psychology, traumatology and complementary medicine.

This book presents an expanded paradigm for understanding the pervasive influence of early childhood shock, trauma and stress on humanity’s evolution and a comprehensive approach for healing them. Based on the Weinholds meta-theory, Developmental Systems Theory(DST), this book explains how developmental shock, trauma and stress disrupt the completion of essential developmental processes in their four-stage model of development and ultimately delay evolution in all human systems.

Developmental shock, trauma and stress impact the development of individuals, couples and families via a phenomenon known as traumatic reenactment. Ultimately it permeates groups, organizations and nation-states so deeply that it delays their development. The Weinholds expand traditional systems theories that were previously applied to only to human microsystems (individuals, couple and families) to also include human macrosystems (groups, community organizations, businesses, political entities, nation-states) and shows how developmental shock or trauma can block or even stall the evolution of civilizations.

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