Rethinking Trauma Treatment: Attachment, Memory Reconsolidation, and Resilience

by Courtney Armstrong

Creating safety, hope, and secure attachment to transform traumatic memories. What makes trauma therapy effective? The answers might surprise you. While therapists have been bombarded with brain science, hundreds of new models, and pressure to use evidence-based techniques, research has demonstrated that the therapeutic relationship ultimately predicts therapy outcomes. This is especially true for traumatized clients. But, what kind of therapeutic relationship? Forming a secure therapeutic alliance with traumatized clients is tricky. How do you help clients trust you after they’ve been abused, betrayed, or exploited? How do you instill hope and convince clients who’ve been devastated by loss to believe that a better life is possible?             In this accessible guide, Courtney Armstrong distills discoveries from attachment theory, brain science, and post-traumatic growth into practical strategies you can use to: 1) build trust and a secure therapeutic relationship; 2) transform traumatic memories into stories of triumph and courage; and 3) help clients cultivate resilience and a positive post-trauma identity.  Packed with dozens of scripts, step-by-step worksheets, and inspiring client stories, this book gives you tools for each phase of the trauma therapy process and shows you how to: Merely talking about a traumatic event is not enough because the parts of the brain where traumatic, implicit memories are stored don’t understand words. Heartfelt, relational experiences catalyze brain change and buffer the impact of trauma. In this book, Armstrong demonstrates that neuroscience is validating what therapists have suspected all along: the brain changes through the heart. 

Genres: Mental Health, Counselling, Psychology, Nonfiction, Neuroscience

264 pages, Hardcover

Published June 25, 2019

Reviews

[Antigone · Rating 5 out of 5]

We begin with the moment of clarity.

Merriam-Webster defines a moment of clarity as: A time when a person suddenly understands something.

It was probably a busy day over there in the defining department at Merriam-Webster; one of those least-effort-possible days that tend to give birth to ironies like this. For it seems abundantly clear that the person assigned to define the moment of clarity was not, in that moment, having one. It's definitions like this that allow so many to mistake a moment of clarity for a moment of recognition, or a moment of realization. Yet those of us who've had them can attest they are far more profound than the common usage admits. A moment of clarity will change your life. I feel fairly confident in asserting that if it doesn't? You didn't have one.

A moment of clarity is better compared to a revelation or an epiphany. Some remark is made, some passage of text worded in such a way, some movement so ordinary a second ago takes on a startlingly existential gravitas; something you may have experienced often enough before, in this particular instant, hits your consciousness at just the right angle...and the tumblers of awareness, all fifteen hundred of them, suddenly click into place. The water of your reasoning miraculously runs clear. At long last you have the truth of it. And an important truth it will be.

There is a new method striding across the field of psychology today, and they are calling it Memory Reconsolidation. What it amounts to is the construction of a moment of clarity. There is a definite design to this, a course in which a therapeutic conversation is deliberately taken, a route the psyche is led to travel, that is meant to result in the re-firing of connections between the traumatically-activated sections of the brain and those sections whose function it is to process trauma but have, through the catastrophic nature of the injury, been driven into dormancy. This is so fresh a development that you will find very little literature on it (most of which will have been produced solely for academics). Courtney Armstrong's Rethinking Trauma Treatment is the first book I've found published for popular consumption that both explains and illustrates the theory - and while it's true she's addressing fellow therapists, there's nothing contained in these pages that the modestly-educated layman will struggle to comprehend.

Attachment, memory reconsolidation, and resilience represent the cutting-edge arenas in brain science today - all of which are housed within an impressive account of Armstrong's work in trauma therapy. A solid and remarkably relevant book.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Armstrong provides one of the most compassionate and practical guides to treating trauma that I have ever read. If you want an in-depth lesson on the affects of trauma, this is not it. But if you want a hopeful guide to working with trauma, full of examples and techniques, this is it!

[Shawn Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly written book that held my attention from the first word until the very last!

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Personally, after starting with Ecker, Ticic and Hulley’s Unlocking The Emotional Brain (the quintessential text on the therapeutic implications of Memory Reconsolidation), Armstrong’s synthesis fell a little flat for me. Her writing seems to explore a few different Person-centered and Narrative styles of consciously working from a “Recon” perspective (as she calls it), but she doesn’t provide an exhaustive explanation of Memory Reconsolidation itself. I do however appreciate Armstrong’s more trauma-informed examples and experiences since Unlocking the Emotional Brain did not delve much into complex trauma presentations, at least in my memory.

That said, I’d highly recommend Ecker, Ticic and Hulley’s Unlocking the Emotional Brain for anyone who is interested in additional learning beyond Armstrong’s work!

[David Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another lockdown 2020 gem.

What a book.

Diving into the relationship between bipolar and trauma offered me the deepest sense of healing and recovery.

Another must read for anyone working in mental health.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[BVC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bisogna iniziare direttamente dal quarto capitolo della prima fase.

[Addie Maranda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great resource for therapists.

[Shelby Crews · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was for school but I enjoyed the read!

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Measured, solid insight. Well worth the read even if you aren’t a psychologist.

[Adrian Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an amazing book. Can't recommend it enough.