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Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope And Recovery in a Violent World
A director of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma draws on hundreds of interviews with trauma victims from around the world to make recommendations on how to draw on the examples of others in order to survive and heal after violent experiences. 16,000 first printing.
- GenresNonfictionPsychologyWar
277 pages, Hardcover
First published December 4, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 20, 2009
I have been an admirer of Richard Mollica ever since I heard him speak in Boston in 1987. His work with refugees and survivors of trauma is monumental and profoundly humanistic and his research contributions have improved our understanding of recovery immeasurably. So I had high expectations when I sat down to read Healing Invisible Wounds as a preparation for a course on trauma and recovery. Mollica is a skilled writer and the depth of his compassion for survivors resounds throughout this book. Unfortunately I often found the logic and evidence behind many of his conclusions to be flawed, although I feel confident that his overall thesis--that healing is a natural process and that medically-based treatment often interferes with it--is valid.
Much of the evidence Mollica presents is derived from his decades of experience with Cambodian refugees, among the most severely traumatized people in the world. Indeed, the gravity of their trauma is due not only to the horrors of the Pol Pot era but to grotesque human rights abuses they suffered while trapped on the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s and early 90s. Sadly, I found Mollica's description of Site 2 to be wildly inaccurate (I know, I was there): Contrary to his description, no one was "severely punished" for praying or writing letters and the camp did have businesses, temples and schools (Mollica says "inmates were forbidden to...go to school [p. 101:]" when in fact over 77 thousand children and 10,000 adults were in school when he visited Site 2 in Oct 1988--which tells us how observant he was!). Nonetheless it was a cruel and hopeless existence for the 160,000 people who stagnated there behind barbed wire at the mercy of Thai border guards, and this is Mollica's point, that some of the worst trauma takes place after the traumatic events, and our misguided efforts to assist refugees and victims of war and violence can often make their problems worse.
Mollica describes an interesting experiment that he conducted with Cambodians in the US, intended to promote self-healing by encouraging diet, exercise and meditation. This is a superb example of the direction that trauma recovery should take, and the results are inspiring. However I had one nagging question: if self-healing is a natural process, why had these refugees not healed themselves, 20 years after Pol Pot and more than a decade after leaving the camps? Throughout the book Mollica implies that a patronizing, drug-dependent and arrogant health care system is often to blame, but he himself says that in most cases the subjects of this particular study had never received treatment. The answer is of course that "self healing" really only happens once survivors understand that it is not only possible but necessary. The subjects in Mollica's study began to heal as they realized that an active program of self-care could relieve their loneliness and depression. Self-healing may be "natural" but it doesn't happen by itself, as Mollica implies; it requires awareness and active implementation on the part of the survivor.
The chapter on interpretation of dreams was a breath of fresh air to me. I have long believed that dreams are significant in the processing of traumatic experiences, as is the act of telling the story, and Mollica's description of how and why these two phenomena are therapeutic is beautifully expounded. In particular, his prescription for how to tell the survivor story, focusing not on the horrifying details but rather on the meaning it holds for the survivor, is enlightening and useful, although hardly new (see Lennis Echterling's Crisis Intervention: Promoting Resilience and Resolution in Troubled Times). Mollica also has valuable insights on the importance of work for trauma survivors, as a means of social rehabilitation, and on the need for survivors to recover dignity in response to the humiliation many experience as part of their trauma.
As a result of this book I am now inspired to use story-telling and dream analysis in my own work with survivors, and to spread the word about self-healing and how to promote it. I believe that Mollica has made a major impact on the theory behind trauma recovery, and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.
Much of the evidence Mollica presents is derived from his decades of experience with Cambodian refugees, among the most severely traumatized people in the world. Indeed, the gravity of their trauma is due not only to the horrors of the Pol Pot era but to grotesque human rights abuses they suffered while trapped on the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s and early 90s. Sadly, I found Mollica's description of Site 2 to be wildly inaccurate (I know, I was there): Contrary to his description, no one was "severely punished" for praying or writing letters and the camp did have businesses, temples and schools (Mollica says "inmates were forbidden to...go to school [p. 101:]" when in fact over 77 thousand children and 10,000 adults were in school when he visited Site 2 in Oct 1988--which tells us how observant he was!). Nonetheless it was a cruel and hopeless existence for the 160,000 people who stagnated there behind barbed wire at the mercy of Thai border guards, and this is Mollica's point, that some of the worst trauma takes place after the traumatic events, and our misguided efforts to assist refugees and victims of war and violence can often make their problems worse.
Mollica describes an interesting experiment that he conducted with Cambodians in the US, intended to promote self-healing by encouraging diet, exercise and meditation. This is a superb example of the direction that trauma recovery should take, and the results are inspiring. However I had one nagging question: if self-healing is a natural process, why had these refugees not healed themselves, 20 years after Pol Pot and more than a decade after leaving the camps? Throughout the book Mollica implies that a patronizing, drug-dependent and arrogant health care system is often to blame, but he himself says that in most cases the subjects of this particular study had never received treatment. The answer is of course that "self healing" really only happens once survivors understand that it is not only possible but necessary. The subjects in Mollica's study began to heal as they realized that an active program of self-care could relieve their loneliness and depression. Self-healing may be "natural" but it doesn't happen by itself, as Mollica implies; it requires awareness and active implementation on the part of the survivor.
The chapter on interpretation of dreams was a breath of fresh air to me. I have long believed that dreams are significant in the processing of traumatic experiences, as is the act of telling the story, and Mollica's description of how and why these two phenomena are therapeutic is beautifully expounded. In particular, his prescription for how to tell the survivor story, focusing not on the horrifying details but rather on the meaning it holds for the survivor, is enlightening and useful, although hardly new (see Lennis Echterling's Crisis Intervention: Promoting Resilience and Resolution in Troubled Times). Mollica also has valuable insights on the importance of work for trauma survivors, as a means of social rehabilitation, and on the need for survivors to recover dignity in response to the humiliation many experience as part of their trauma.
As a result of this book I am now inspired to use story-telling and dream analysis in my own work with survivors, and to spread the word about self-healing and how to promote it. I believe that Mollica has made a major impact on the theory behind trauma recovery, and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.
June 28, 2009
This book will change you. You will have new hope. It is the number one book on my list that I would want someone interested in human rights to read. You will see that people in wars and genocides are resilient - they can and do heal themselves from the incredibly tragic circumstances they endure.
And these survivors have so much to teach the rest of us.
Mollica, who heads a center for refugee trauma, describes four elements of the trauma story:
1. Facts
2. Culture
3. Spirituality
4. Listener-Storyteller Relationship
We in the U.S. often stop at Facts. We are not accustomed to questioning or listening with a bent toward culture or spirituality. We are not used to acknowledging the importance of the relationship between the listener and the person telling the story. When we open ourselves to these dimensions, we encourage healing - in those surviving trauma, in ourselves as listeners, in the world.
And these survivors have so much to teach the rest of us.
Mollica, who heads a center for refugee trauma, describes four elements of the trauma story:
1. Facts
2. Culture
3. Spirituality
4. Listener-Storyteller Relationship
We in the U.S. often stop at Facts. We are not accustomed to questioning or listening with a bent toward culture or spirituality. We are not used to acknowledging the importance of the relationship between the listener and the person telling the story. When we open ourselves to these dimensions, we encourage healing - in those surviving trauma, in ourselves as listeners, in the world.
August 16, 2018
It's not often I read books that are so far away from my daily life than this book about trauma and the recovery thereof. It is more accurate to say that the book is about self-healing from trauma. Richard F. Mollica does a great job in building up the theme, first by describing trauma and then by showing how the self-healing process works and can develop. There is hope and a way of healing that is induced by ones own working. In this journey, you are yourself forced to take a look at a few of your processes of healing even though in my case it probably was not near as severe than the examples in the book. We all cope, and Mollica try to figure out the how, and how it can be put to good use. Mollica's examples are limited to where he has done most of his work, places like Cambodia and Serbia, but also a few other countries are represented. This focus makes the trauma stories a little less reliable, but maybe also good as examples as they are real and we will encounter more of the kinds in our world. For a practitioner in the field, this is probably more of a tailored read. I found the first half of the book most interesting, especially chapter 3 on humiliation. When Mollica goes into demon possession it becomes a bit far-fetched and for a Christian, the discussion about it in the book sounds iffy. The cultural aspect is nevertheless important and also part of the process.
July 17, 2019
A very story-heavy book, which makes me wonder who it is really written for. Health care professionals might have a hard time making practical use of it, but certainly for the rest of us it is very enlightening.
February 12, 2021
Powerful and inspiring book about the ability for self-healing in refugees and how this can enlighten those of us in more ordinary day-to-day situations
March 8, 2014
"...the boy chose not to let these events rob him of the joy of life." ~ The boy was Richard Mollica's father, who witnessed his own father's murder when he was nine years old. Richard honours the memory and the example of his father, Carmelo -- a man who "fashioned a hopeful reality out of tragedy" and was known to say with a wink, "Don't worry, it's going to get worse" -- in this masterful book about trauma -- what Mollica calls the "existential injury."
His essential thesis is that we all have experienced trauma, carry its story within us, and need to tell the story in some articulate form that is witnessed and deeply heard by another. How do we live with having been taken by Event, in a way that doesn't have us "turning away in impotent despair"? Mollica's thinking and writing are full of heart -- he portrays people who have survived horrors like tsunamis, torture, and war as people who "with quiet dignity, convert [their] unspeakable pain into the energy of survival and self-healing."
Current trends in trauma therapy tend to focus on the present moment (via cognitive-behavioural modalities) almost to the exclusion of a person's history -- the narrative of a life lived. (I was once told by a therapist, whose specialty was trauma, that the past wasn't "allowed" into the working process; nor were -- I'd asked -- matters of spirit [delicious irony there: "matters of spirit"].)
Richard Mollica admits the entire person into his healing mileu; history begins to be made in the instant after Event impacts us. As for the telling of "the trauma story" (as he calls it, with deep respect), Healing Invisible Wounds charts a practical and reverent course through the reception of history. He does not mince words ("[We] do not know how to speak about and understand the terrible experiences that human beings inflict on each other every day"), yet his work is suffused with persistent compassion, and an approach that admits and embraces all cultures -- from the familial to the national and ancestral. One survivor of the Khmer Rouge (Vietnam, 1970s) tells Richard, "All I can think about is just to build a temple--that is all."
To make a trauma story sacred, we must begin with the assumption that human life and human history are worthy of being. This belief informs Mollica's work both as a clinician (he is a doctor) and as the director of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma.
(to be cont'd)
His essential thesis is that we all have experienced trauma, carry its story within us, and need to tell the story in some articulate form that is witnessed and deeply heard by another. How do we live with having been taken by Event, in a way that doesn't have us "turning away in impotent despair"? Mollica's thinking and writing are full of heart -- he portrays people who have survived horrors like tsunamis, torture, and war as people who "with quiet dignity, convert [their] unspeakable pain into the energy of survival and self-healing."
Current trends in trauma therapy tend to focus on the present moment (via cognitive-behavioural modalities) almost to the exclusion of a person's history -- the narrative of a life lived. (I was once told by a therapist, whose specialty was trauma, that the past wasn't "allowed" into the working process; nor were -- I'd asked -- matters of spirit [delicious irony there: "matters of spirit"].)
Richard Mollica admits the entire person into his healing mileu; history begins to be made in the instant after Event impacts us. As for the telling of "the trauma story" (as he calls it, with deep respect), Healing Invisible Wounds charts a practical and reverent course through the reception of history. He does not mince words ("[We] do not know how to speak about and understand the terrible experiences that human beings inflict on each other every day"), yet his work is suffused with persistent compassion, and an approach that admits and embraces all cultures -- from the familial to the national and ancestral. One survivor of the Khmer Rouge (Vietnam, 1970s) tells Richard, "All I can think about is just to build a temple--that is all."
To make a trauma story sacred, we must begin with the assumption that human life and human history are worthy of being. This belief informs Mollica's work both as a clinician (he is a doctor) and as the director of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma.
(to be cont'd)
May 29, 2011
An optimistic and accessible account of psychological trauma and the human capacity to heal. Well grounded in science, but overlaid with a huge dose of humanism and religiosity. I think Mollica correctly blasts the over-emphasis (by media, humanitarians, therapists, etc.) on the trauma event itself, and makes a passionate plea to focus attention on the everyday leftover burdens that victims bear after the horror. But, I think he places too much responsibility and hope upon the patient's capacity to heal. Nevertheless, it is a really useful handbook for my work in Aceh, reminding me of the issues that plague my informants as victims of conflict and/or tsunami and the issues that challenge me as a researcher.
November 19, 2012
This book is more of a memoir of an interesting and diverse career in sometimes ground-breaking areas. I was looking for a book that explains PTSD and its healing/treatment (as this book was marketed to be), thus the 3-star rating. However, as a memoir, it's very interesting. There are many moments of hope even after extreme violence; however, I was also struck with a lot of sadness about the obstacles and discrimination that minorities continue to face.
March 10, 2016
Great book on tough violent stories ranging from the PolPot killer squads in APAC to the ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe. The power of the book comes from the decades of research by Dr. and the personal stories gathered from many victims of all these horrible killing fields and how they overcame their experience. A story about how human spirit prevails from PTSD. Great for any one recovering from the 80-90 Crack epidemic in Queens and all other boroughs.
Read
August 7, 2011An interesting read about how people deal with the traumas of genocide, torture and natural disasters. He makes a strong case for self healing through the telling of the trauma story and the support of the community with work as an important element in self validation helping to overcome the loss of self esteem that comes with torture, displacement and loss.
October 28, 2016
Excellent book on the subject of trauma and healing. Mollica's position is that no one can heal another from trauma. The best we can do is provide the tools for self-healing. Mollica is wonderfully accessible and oh so inspiring. He is honest about the difficulty of his work and the amount of compassion and passion it takes to care for those in pain.
March 28, 2014
I enjoyed the book quite a bit. It reminds me about the importance of deep listening and the opportunity to tell life stories in a meaningful way to heal trauma. I am curious about how his learnings can be taken beyond the psychiatrist's office - I would have liked to hear more about this.
October 23, 2007
This book is very inspiring and optimistic, but still candid about what trauma survivors go through. There are some interesting concepts here that will definitely help me with my job!
April 20, 2013
A must read for anyone who works with hurting people
December 6, 2015
Explains how the story of trauma includes strength and lessons for us all.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews