Janina Fisher is amazing, and I can’t recommend this book enough. It is designed to be accessible for both therapists and clients, although I found it more geared towards training therapists in this trauma treatment perspective and method. If you are not a counsellor yourself, or even if you are, I would recommend this book in combination with the workbook of the same name because the workbook’s exercises help make these concepts three dimensional. Janina Fisher has her PhD in psychology and over three decades of experience in the trauma treatment field. She views trauma related disorders as disorders of the body, brain and nervous system rather than as disorders of events. She views trauma responses as adaptive rather than evidence of a pathology. Fisher’s book looks at trauma treatment through a neurobiological lens, walking the reader through internal fragmentation of the self, structural dissociation, and disconnection of the left-brain self who deals with everyday tasks and the right-brain self who remains braced for danger.

Fisher discusses the cost of self-alienation and the internal conflicts that often accompany this splitting of the self into fragments. She presents methods of recognizing when old stories/narratives are biased not in one’s favour, and how to learn not to interpret one’s reactions as data about the immediate present.

The goal of Fisher’s approach is repair, rather than remembering or revisiting all the most horrible things in one’s life. This repair happens through building internal acceptance, recognizing moments of inner togetherness and creating internal secure attachment. All this is done through a neurobiological lens, teaching the reader how to harness the brain’s complexity to heal one’s self.