Summary

“Healing from Trauma: Owning Your Self” begins with a tongue-in-cheek quote from a poem referencing how many people mock talk therapy for making those who utilize it self-centered. Author van der Kolk then prologues the chapter with the suggestion that healing trauma is not about changing the past experience, but teaching people how to deal with present-day experiences arising from the past. He outlines the goals of treatment (which all boil down to finding ways of living healthily and safely in the present) and outlines how the next several chapters are going to consider ways to achieve those goals in detail.

In “A New Focus for Recovery,” the author suggests that recovery can function most effectively through both identifying the trauma at the heart of someone’s struggles, and learning how to both control psycho-emotional reactions during the reliving of...