An insightful and wide perspective on Trauma, Mindfulness and Social-Cultural-Structures

The book is primarily directed to mindfulness-teachers, wanting to gaining awareness of people struggling with mindfulness-practice and how to help them in meditation. As a mindfulness student with some emotional-past I found this book also super helpful for myself. I gained a lot of knowledge and context of Trauma and could take with me many practical suggestions and modifications for the practice.

I would say that the book covers three, not two, key-topics:

Mindfulness: The author gives a good introduction on mindfulness. This is delivered in Trauma-Context what gives a whole new perspective. It dampens the western mindful-hype a bit and its often reported power „to heal everything“. He also focus on the

Trauma: The author gives a neuro-psychological overwiev of what Trauma is. He makes clear that it‘s a crucial life-saving and natural program of our body that can be well respected. Also he explains why and how these Trauma-programs occur. He gives many tipps to reintegrate Trauma, especially in mindful-context.

Social-Cultural-Structures: An unexpected but very insightful aspect of the book is it strong focus on history and presence of social or cultural structures in the US. As an european reader I could not relate to everything, but with slight adaptions made, still to most of the interesting topics. The author explains how oppression of social or cultural groups negatively affects their lifes and can cause Trauma. He gives deeper explanations why oppression of groups may be unnoticed or ignored by its surroundig. Oppression can be invisible to the oppressors, if it happens unconscious. Also he points out that being neutral in an unfair fight (i.e. a man hits a children) means supporting the side of the perpetrator(s). Such dynamics play a crucial role to understand trauma-history and being empathic in contact to people experienced traumatic oppression. However this social-cultural-context differs in every country, so the knowledge cannot be applied everywhere. This US-only-focus could have been pointed out more clearly. Still I think the infos are valuable for most western countries.

These three aspect make the book a very rich and wide perspective on trauma. Notice however that (of course) not every dynamic of Trauma is covered. What I personally missed was the role of trauma in family and how strong emotions of parents can be passed to the next genrations. Franz Ruppert‘s understanding of trauma is that a lot of traumas come from unhealthy relationships of children to their mother, the person with the earliest and closest connection to a child. Having a traumatised mother, that been through unbearable times of oppression per instance, the body is still occupied by these emotions. The children then cannot grow up in healthy circumstances, beeing traumatised again. If the child won’t heal this trauma it will likely pass it on again to the next generation. This is called transgenerational trauma. Probably there are some other dynamics of trauma as well, that couldn‘t be covered in the book, but I have to few information to mention more.

Going away from the content, the book is clearly ment for studying rather than be a side-entertainment. The language is clear and well-written, so it is easy to follow if your interested in the topic. Many personal examples make the knowledge vivid and relatable. I needed to listen some parts twice or three times to take the most of it. I also could suggest buying the printed book instead or as an addition. I didn‘t read it but can imagine such a topic is easier on paper. I will for sure relisten the book to solid the knowledge or buy the book as well.

A down-side of the book is, like with most audible books, that there are very few audio-chapters and no chapter-titles. It was unnecessary work for me to do, to bookmark the 36 trauma-modifications - this can easily be done by the producers. It also helps giving clearer structure in this complex matter, so it even has a direct impact on the book-content.

The review, that the book has no practical suggestions, is not understandable to me - its full of them. Also it has a lot of book references. This helps finding resources for deeper study or practice.

Overall the book is a giant source of information for me and helps integrate trauma-parts, spread my range of trauma-tolerance and made me understand better how to interact with people and their trauma-parts. Especially the unexpected social-cultural-structure part widened my view enormously. Thanks a lot for the great and empathic work. I hope this review can help someone on similar or differnet ways.

Sie haben diese Rezension bewertet.

Wir haben Ihre Meldung erhalten und werden die Rezension prüfen.

4 Leute fanden das hilfreich

Boring

Even though I find the subject very interesting, I find the way the narrator speaks and the content of this book unfortunately boring.

Sie haben diese Rezension bewertet.

Wir haben Ihre Meldung erhalten und werden die Rezension prüfen.

This book is only full of anecdotal stories.

This book is only full of anecdotal stories about traumatised people. while saying the word"mindfulness" a lot, the author never actually delivers any suggestions of methods, techniques or solutions.
he also apparently had bad experiences with less specially mindfulness or meditation trainers, as he continually talks negatively about them, and what their inexperience could miss.
if you have trauma, leave the book alone, as there is more chance the 9hrs of negative stories will trigger you instead of help you.
perhaps the book helps healthy people understand what trauma is, or realise that they actually have trauma.

Sie haben diese Rezension bewertet.

Wir haben Ihre Meldung erhalten und werden die Rezension prüfen.

2 Leute fanden das hilfreich