Excellent book giving both theory and practice of how to work with trauma. I'm studying her work now in Level I training and plan to use this book for the long haul as a reference text. Her work is built around Hakomi body-centered psychotherapy principles, Pat Ogden had a long stretch working with Ron Kurtz, so I'm reading his books as well. It's all in the lineage with my Continuum movement work and I'm delighted to read these astute psychologists, the pioneers who brought the importance of body work into the therapeutic process.

Gestalt therapy emptied of its phenomenological framework and refitted into a neuro/neo-behaviourist lens. Good information, but another example of scientific imperialism — the taking of decades old humanist developments and re-presenting them as valid and novel through science. Very repetitive. Perhaps an ironic move by the author, to structure the book after trauma.

The key idea here is that there are three registers of consciousness: the somatic, the affective and the cognitive — essentially: physical sensations, emotions and thoughts. Psychotherapy has developed treatments for processing thoughts and emotions, but not bodily states. Through becoming aware of one's bodily state, one becomes aware of not only one's triggers, but one's automatisms after triggering — nonconscious action patterns, sensations across time, reflex behavioural intentions, and so forth. Because trauma is deeply embodied, there is a need to become re-embodied, to return to the body and integrate these points of intensity, for healing to occur.