A Womans Guide to Recovery or Women Who Hurt Themselves

A Woman's Guide to Recovery

Author: Brenda Iliff

Whether you are just embarking down the road of recovery or are well into the journey, consider Brenda Iliff's A Woman's Guide to Recovery your companion and guide. Brenda Iliff is a leading Hazelden clinician. She developed this guide to help women handle issues and challenges that come with their new life of recovery: How can you balance self-care with family responsibilities? What do you do about friends who aren't comfortable with your newfound sobriety? How do you rebuild family relationships? A Woman's Guide to Recovery offers real-life insight into what it means and what it takes to sustain healthy, lasting recovery.

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Women Who Hurt Themselves: A Book of Hope and Understanding 10th Anniversary Edition

Author: Dusty Miller

For years, the harm that some women do to themselves was ignored and silenced, both in psychological literature and in homes and hospitals. Dusty Miller’s eye-opening book revealed the truth about a syndrome that has plagued millions—and continues to do so today, endangering ever-younger lives. Filled with moving stories, this powerful book was the first to focus on women who engage in different forms of self-mutilation.Miller is widely recognized as the first expert to identify the roots of “cutting” and other self-injurious behavior in women. These women suffer from what she calls “Trauma Reenactment Syndrome” (TRS), a pattern of behavior in which they reenact severe psychological or physical harm done to them as children. In the decade since her work was first published, new research has supported Miller’s perspective. In her introduction to this tenth anniversary edition, Miller discusses what self-harming women and abuse survivors have known all along: that self-injury activates endorphins that actually calm the psychic pain of old wounds. She describes the latest treatments geared to this view—and offers, once again, hope and understanding to the women themselves and to those who care for them.

Publishers Weekly

Women traumatized in childhood hurt themselves more often than men do because men are socialized to act aggressively and fight back, notes psychologist Miller, who is director of Clinical Mentoring at Antioch/New England Graduate School. Here she addresses childhood trauma, to which the individual may react by dissociating, but such fragmentation of the personality becomes the basis of her failure to protect herself as an adult. While integrating various treatment approaches, Miller's program focuses on the ``triadic self,'' which she describes as the victim, abuser and nonprotecting bystander within. In the painful narratives culled from her private practice, Miller establishes that such self-destructive behavior as bulimia and cosmetic surgery ``tells the secret story of women's childhood experience over and over again.'' She describes the behavior of her clients as trauma reenactment syndrome (TRS), which, stresses Miller, explains why they are impervious to treatment in 12-step programs and conventional therapy, often being misdiagnosed and mistreated. The author presents evidence that TRS women can be helped to lasting recovery. (May)