Unspeakable Truths and Happy Endings: Human Cruelty and the New Trauma Therapy

Rating:
Summary: Timely and very, very important.
Review: Carefully researched and beautifully written, UnspeakableTruths and Happy Endings is perhaps the most understandable andconvincing coverage of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to appear to date. Author Rebecca Coffey transcribes vividly and in depth, and with compassion and balance, several troubling, heartrending tales of human cruelty, analyzing their consequences, placing them in context in view of the heated debate that surrounds PTSD. She has done us all a great service with her thoughtful and restrained analysis of the diverse attitudes surrounding this complex issue. With the crush of increasing population upon us, violence induced unresolved stress is rapidly becoming a "need to know" subject for all of us. It won't go away in our lifetime. I heartily recommend this book as more than an introduction. It should be required reading for survival in today's world.

Rating:
Summary: A spirited, comprehensive, articulate presentation.
Review: In Unspeakable Truths And Happy Endings: Human Cruelty And The New Trauma Therapy, author Rebecca Coffey offers a spirited, comprehensive discussion of the role of mental health professionals who, in an effort to help men and women traumatized by horrific circumstances and events, sometimes destroy their clients families. Yet the value of reviewing past traumatic events such as incest, physical abuse, emotional neglect, adultery, alcoholism, substance addiction, abandonment, etc., in order to make peace with the past is clearly beneficial and a proper aspect of psychological treatment. Unspeakable Truths And Happy Endings takes a nicely balanced view of the roles and limitations of telling, listening, psychotherapy, and psychotherapists in the healing process. Coffey offers a new and more enlightened understanding for psychologists, counselors, and clients that will help to insure a successful outcome to dealing with the unspeakable and be ultimately assured of improved mental health and psychological well-being.