Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding, may seem fuzzy, don't let that fool you
Review: This book will seem somewhat vague at first, but it will sink in better if you re-read it several times, especially the later sections. Levine and Frederick capture the essence of post-traumatic stress; your whole body is perpetually reliving the traumatic experience(s) and triggering distorted thinking, feeling, and behavior that otherwise make no sense. Levine's hook is to compare human trauma reactions to animal reactions. This gives him a model to break down the blocked cycle of somatic and mental reactions into pieces: hyperarousal, constricted consciousness - sometimes wrongly called "repression" - dissociation, and helplessness in and/or avoidance of triggering situations. Like all good psychology books, it also makes useful analogies and comparisons so that non-sufferers can get a glimpse of what it's like.I recommend this book together with Babette Rothschild's The Body Remembers. That book is aimed at a medical/clinical audience, not at patients, but it carries the same message in a different way: the frozen, endlessly repeated body reactions are the lever to freeing the patient. It's like an alarm that was never shut off. The feelings, thoughts, and memories will follow. This approach entirely circumvents the sterile "false memory" controversy and quasi-Freudian approaches that use catharsis and abreaction - these methods make the PTSD reactions worse, while distorting the patient's memories and feelings further. The key is to DE-sensitize the patient, not to recycle the original trauma. Desensitization not only defuses the trauma, it allows the patient to remember the event(s) more accurately. If the trauma is not defused, the patient cannot remember properly. Accurately remembering is a byproduct of successful treatment, NOT the starting point.
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Summary: Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma
Review: This exciting, insightful book reinforces the wholeness of the human vehicle, that our body and triune brain of instinct, emotion and rationality are totally connected to the human experience and to our connection with all of life. The book explains why humans are often frozen in trauma, unlike animals who daily cope with the unpredictability of nature and man. For humans, as is true for animals, the potential for trauma exists from birth through death, with at least one major difference - that humans have a harder time releasing trauma and many carry it all of their lives, which causes major interference with health, peace of mind and the ability to live joyfully and creatively. When human trauma remains unhealed, the energy of the trauma and accompanying emotions will remain locked within the brain and held within the body's musculature, tissues and organs awaiting discharge. Like Sleeping Beauty awaiting her restoration to life once the poisoned apple is dislodged, those with deep psychological scars have disassociated the memory from their minds and are living in a numbed, tensed body awaiting its release so the body can return to wholeness and optimum mental and physical health. The author persuasively asserts that psychological wounds are reversible and that healing comes when the physical and mental letting go occurs, similar to the way the tiger experiences the coming and going of threat, tensing in response to danger, and as the threat passes, the tiger's muscles shake, twitch and let go right then and there the fear related energy which now is forever out of mind and body. So, too, Peter Levine states, can humans learn to release long-held and/or current trauma without return. The book is well-written, peppered with healing stories, and details step-by-step instructions on how to listen to the wisdom of the body to release trauma and heal. Consider this book as one great step forward to expanding the frontier of body/mind energy work that is emerging as the most comprehensive and effective wellness paradigm of the future.
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Summary: Great New Thinking About Healing Trauma
Review: This is a fantastic book because it clarifies what we go through during trauma and how we can continue the process instead of stopping it. Once we stop it, as we humans like to do, stop the emotions, we stop the process of healing. The authors help us to understand that we can release energy that otherwise gets "stuck" within us and benefit from that release. Letting go, for some of us, is a good lesson for life.
Rating:
Summary: Ideas resonate with what I've learned through experience
Review: This is a great book for anyone who has been through trauma and is fighting their way back. Or for anyone who is loving someone through this. I have been working through my 'stuff' for years, and when I came across this book, it just made everything click. The times I've trembled and shook out of anger, and fear, and shame - those have all had tremendously healing impact - and now I understand why! It also relieved my 'mental' side, which likes to know the WHY of everything. This gave insight into how the body responds to trauma, and WHY.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: This is a very good, excellent resource for those wanting to make the step forward on the healing path. It certainly covers a broud range of lessons. Ranks right up there with books such as NIGHTMARES ECHO and LOST BOY. Teaches the victim how to become a survivor. Excellent Excellent Book I would recommend for everyone to read.
Rating:
Summary: Fresh insights
Review: This is a well written book that provides a different perspective on how to work with traumatic experiences. As one who has always "lived in my head" to get through not only the trauma is it occurred, but also as I work through the aftermath, this book provided good insight into WHY I needed to include a physical aspect to my healing.
Rating:
Summary: Fresh insights
Review: This is a well written book that provides a different perspective on how to work with traumatic experiences. As one who has always "lived in my head" to get through not only the trauma is it occurred, but also as I work through the aftermath, this book provided good insight into WHY I needed to include a physical aspect to my healing.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, but just okay
Review: Waking the Tiger certainly does give its reader some interesting ideas about trauma. But for me, it all seemed alittle to scientific and clinical. This is not a "feel good" self-help book. It approaches trauma from an entirely different perspective.
I found the book interesting, but maybe it just wasn't what I expected. There is alot of deep ideas here, but I don't think the book is that inspirational.
Rating:
Summary: a surprise
Review: Waking The Tiger is written in a simple, easily understood language that really manages to effectively pack the punch in the intellectual department. Most self-help books fall victim to so many cliches and buzzwords, but what we have here is a genuinely thoughtful, inspired discourse on the dimensions of trauma and the hopefulness of getting through to brighter days. Even more powerful is the gradually influential effect of the chapters as they bring you closer and closer to actually experiencing the joy of gaining knowledge about the subject and getting over it. Surprisingly useful and enjoyable book!
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Summary: Nature's Lessons in Healing Trauma
Review: Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question--why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed. Waking the Tiger normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us focus on bodily sensations. Through a heightened awareness of these sensations trauma can be healed.
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