Heal the Body, Heal the Mind: A Somatic Approach to Moving Beyond Trauma

by Susanne Babbel, Marti Glenn (Foreword)

Traumatic events can leave mental and physical scars—but these scars don’t have to define you. Heal the Body, Heal the Mind takes trauma survivors on a supportive and healing journey toward well-being. By practicing the somatic exercises and mind-body interventions in this compassionate guide, you’ll learn to move past difficult experiences, restore relationships, and cultivate spiritual awareness. When trauma occurs, the logical mind is hijacked and physiology takes over in an effort to protect you. This leaves an imprint—your body wants to ensure that nothing like that will ever happen again. Being reminded of a traumatic event can trigger these automatic responses, leaving you feeling paralyzed or unable to take action. This book will help you understand why and how unresolved trauma can infiltrate all aspects of your life, including your mind and body—even when you’re not aware of its influence. With Heal the Body, Heal the Mind as a gentle guide, you’ll learn about different types of trauma, find helpful assessments, and discover how traumatic experiences—even childhood and incidental traumas—can affect all aspects of your your relationship choices, the roles you play in them, your sense of pleasure and desire, and how you approach your career, spirituality, and interactions with others. Using the combination of mind-body interventions, cognitive behavioral theories, research, case studies, and exercises woven into each chapter of this warm-hearted, relatable book, you’ll begin to address the unresolved trauma held in your body and advance your healing process. So, if you’re ready to move beyond the trauma that’s been holding you back in your relationships, at work, and in your spiritual practice, this guide will show you how.

Genres: Health, Psychology, Self Help

200 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2018

Reviews

[yamiyoghurt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great self-help book with sound advice and good exercises. It is easy to read and follow through. I've learnt something from it.

[Haneen saddam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you

[Pet · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a former cancer patient I've read a few books about healing and handling a trauma, and this book is a very good guide. It explained the condition you are in after experiencing a trauma and made aware why it's so important to get out of the post traumatic situation and move on. The authors set up categories of traumas and lead you through ways to handle the aftermath in a very understandable and acceptable way which, in my opinion, is the key of having success - a lot of the other self-help books I read had more of a "you have to...!" than helping the reader to find out of its own situation at first which is somehow the most difficult part of everything and necessary for any healing.. If you're willing to follow their lead of finding your way out, I believe you're doing a good thing to give it a try with this guiding nook. It's a well-thought through but careful self-help book which I would and will recommend to everyone who faced a trauma.

[Lorena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a relatively quick read providing easy to understand information about how we’re affected by trauma and how we can heal. Although I’ve already read quite a bit in this area, I still learned new things, and I found the book to be a very good overview, written in a very friendly, soothing voice. I found the chapters on how trauma affects relationships and sexuality to be particularly helpful.

The author has done a nice job of alternating theories, research, case studies, and exercises. Dr. Susanne Babbel provides many citations, but she writes in a way that is never dry or boring. I think this book will be really helpful for anyone who has experienced trauma or wants to better understand a loved one who has experienced trauma. That’s probably most of us.

If you create an account on New Harbinger’s website and register this book to your account, you can access the supplementary material. At the time of this review, I was able to download an MP3 of a guided relaxation exercise to promote restful sleep.

I was provided an ARC through NetGalley that I volunteered to review. Because I have not seen the final published version, I cannot comment on the final editing and formatting. The ARC was neatly formatted and had only occasional proofreading errors.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was okay. There were some helpful exercises that I could see working with some clients. However, I had expected it to be much more focused on somatic symptoms and treatment and, while there is some of that, all the techniques in this book seemed very CBT and I was hoping for different methods of assisting clients. This is still a useful book for the exercises provided.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed how easy it was to read the book and how seamless the book flows. As someone who has experienced trauma from a young age, I can definitely resonate with the author's activities and practices. I felt like the book was long enough to explain situations in detail but not so long that you start to get bored.

I would recommend it for a quick and easy read.

[Lauryn Clemmer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I just expected this book to be something different. Really focused a lot on naming various traumas at the beginning of the book. Was less about how the mind and body carry trauma which was what I was expecting. Had a few basic exercises but not really that helpful to me.

[Roseanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good

[Carina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, soothing and full of love.

[Rain · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 🌟

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very helpful. Especially the 2nd half of the book about finances, career and limiting beliefs.

[Arja Salafranca · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very useful guide to trauma - the author explains clearly how trauma impacts on us, and how trauma lives on through the years. Eye-opening and enlightening. But this book is about healing, and there are both case studies and exercises, which you can do on the journey to understanding and healing.