Mindfulness Skills
Trauma touches every life, but the way that we hold our pain can make a difference.
Mindfulness Skills for Trauma and PTSD is a user-friendly guide to help understand and manage your mind after trauma, and offers practical strategies for healing. It explains core concepts of mindfulness, self-compassion, and the many facets of trauma. The book teaches specific techniques, grounded in scientific evidence, for handling challenges such as intrusive thoughts and memories, depression, anxiety, and dissociation. Survivors’ personal stories throughout the book illustrate how mindfulness practices lead to recovery, empowerment, and resilience.
Readers can personalize their reading experience to address one or several issues; to understand trauma and its effects more deeply; or to cultivate overall mindfulness, resilience, and well-being. Presented in an accessible and respectful style, the book’s practices can empower survivors of diverse traumas—including emotional abuse or bullying, military trauma, physical or sexual violence, illness, accidents, disasters, grief and loss—to recover and thrive.
Whether you are a trauma survivor, friend or family member, mindfulness teacher, student, or health professional, this book has substantial resources to offer. Practices that focus on navigating and tolerating distress, decreasing self-criticism, directing attention, enhancing relaxation, clarifying feelings, and building kindness toward ourselves can each propel trauma recovery. By working skillfully with our challenges, we can each reduce suffering and build lasting strengths.
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Praise for Mindfulness Skills for Trauma and PTSD: Practices for Recovery and Resilience by Rachel Goldsmith Turow
“Dr. Turow combines a deep understanding of mindfulness practice with extensive knowledge of what the research literature has taught us about the consequences of trauma. The result is a beautiful synthesis, which gently and intelligently teaches the reader how practices that cultivate mindfulness, kindness, and compassion can help us to heal from trauma. The book is likely to benefit not only individuals who have sustained trauma, but also mindfulness teachers and therapists.” — David J. Kearney, MD, Physician, VA Puget Sound Health Care System, Professor of Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine
“What a valuable and accessible resource this book offers, not only to clinicians working with trauma survivors, but to trauma survivors themselves. It makes the sometimes challenging world of mindfulness understandable, and demonstrates the very practical applications of this ancient healing art to the real and pressing problems of traumatized individuals. It's one I'll be sharing with the people I train and the people I treat.” — Laura S. Brown, PhD, ABPP, Independent practice, Seattle WA, Past President, APA Division of Trauma Psychology
“This volume is packed with treasures; the author describes literally dozens of practices that those who are dealing with trauma can beneficially put to use, and which are amply illustrated by research data and by personal accounts. The mind can be our worst enemy but also our dearest friend; it can be the cause of crippling disease but, ironically, the means of healing it too. Through her insightful analogy of the 'golden mend' (kintsukuroi) Turow highlights how the places where we have been most severely broken can become both the strongest and most beautiful aspects of our being. This book reminds us that things create their opposites, and that is a message of hope for us all.” — Ajahn Amaro, Buddhist monk and teacher
“Turow’s approach to teaching has a voice of kindness and patience, creating a guidebook that is a not a bulleted instruction piece but rather a comforting resource.” — Kevin Jeffrey Goldwater, Somatic Therapy Today
