Pain & trauma books & resources

Therapeutic Parenting Essentials: Moving from Trauma to Trust

By Sarah Naish

Year: 2020

All families of children affected by trauma are on a journey, and this book will help to guide you and your family on your journey from trauma to trust. Sarah Naish shares her own experiences of adopting five siblings. She describes how to use therapeutic parenting – a deeply nurturing parenting style – to overcome common challenges when raising children who have experienced trauma. The book describes a series of difficult episodes for her family, exploring both parent’s and child’s experiences of the same events – with the child’s experience written by a former fostered child – and in doing so reveals the very good reasons why traumatized children behave as they do. The book explores the misunderstandings that grow between parents and their children, and provides comfort to the reader – you are not the only family going through this! Full of insights from a family and others who have really been there, this book gives you advice and strategies to help you and your family thrive.

Location

CCL

Explain Pain

By David Butler

Year: 2003

Subject: Pain management

Recent advances in fields such as neurophysiology, brain imaging, immunology, psychology and cellular biology have provided an explanatory platform from which to explore pain. In everyday language accompanied by quirky illustrations, Explain Pain Second Edition discusses how pain responses are produced by the brain, how responses to injury from the autonomic motor and immune systems in your body contribute to pain, and why pain can persist after tissues have had plenty of time to heal.

Location

CCL

The Body Keeps the Score

By Bessel Van der Kolk

Year: 2015

Subject: Trauma

What causes people to continually relive what they most want to forget, and what treatments could help restore them to a life with purpose and joy? Here, Dr Bessel van der Kolk offers a new paradigm for effectively treating traumatic stress. Neither talking nor drug therapies have proven entirely satisfactory. With stories of his own work and those of specialists around the globe, The Body Keeps the Score sheds new light on the routes away from trauma which lie in the regulation and syncing of body and mind, using sport, drama, yoga, mindfulness, meditation and other routes to equilibrium.

Location

CCL

MHERC

HL

Overcoming Chronic Pain: A self help guide using Cognitive Behavioural Techniques

By Frances Cole

Year: 2005

Subject: Pain

Chronic pain does not need to dominate your life. The health team behind this book has established a self-help method based on techniques tested with patients in community and hospital programs.

Location

CCL

Painful Yarns
Metaphors & Stories to Help Understand the Biology of Pain

By Lorimer Mosely

Year: 2010

Subject: Pain

Written by Oxford University Fellow and Pain Scientist, Dr GL Moseley, this book provides an entertaining and informative way to understand modern pain biology. Described by critics as ‘a gem’ and by clinicians as ‘entertaining and educative’, Painful Yarns is a unique book. The stories, some of his travels in outback Australia, some of experiences growing up, are great yarns. At the end of each story, there is a section “so what has this got to do with pain?” in which Lorimer uses the story as a metaphor for some aspect of pain biology.

Location

CCL

Manage Your Pain: Practical and Positive Ways of Adapting to Chronic Pain

By Michael Nicholas

Year: 2012

Subject: Pain

Sufferers of chronic pain learn how to adapt their lives and negotiate their discomfort with the techniques illustrated in this book. A wide range of approaches for managing persistent pain are described, offering chronic pain sufferers options that take into account the level of pain and lifestyle. Based on two highly successful multidisciplinary pain-management programs in the UK and Australia, the suggestions demonstrate awareness of current medical thinking and draw on the latest scientific research. For people who do not wish to rely on prescribed drugs, an integrated method is used, including physiotherapy and psychological techniques.

Location

CCL

HL

Trauma: From Lockerbie to 7/7: How trauma affects our minds and how we fight back

By G Turnbull

Year: 2011

Subject: Trauma

9/11, the war in Iraq, the London bombings, now Afghanistan …Thousands died, and in their aftermath, many more became prisoners of their own devastated minds – their only hope: a small number of dedicated pioneers working to piece together the crumbled fragments of their lives. The Ancient Greeks called it ‘trauma’. And yet almost three thousand years later what was identified as shellshock during the First World War was still mistaken for cowardice or lack of moral fibre. Only since Vietnam have we begun to understand the symptoms and the causes of what is now known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Dr Gordon Turnbull recognised PTSD as a serious clinical condition from the start of his career as a psychiatrist in the RAF. It afflicts people hit by violent tragedy, injury or shock, and, directly or indirectly, it can affect us all. Andy McNab and Johnson Beharry VC are just two of the hundreds who have benefited from Gordon’s care and counsel. “Trauma” explores the stories behind the headlines, and of those much closer to home. It describes how Gordon treated them, how this treatment often flew in the face of accepted ‘knowledge’, and how it was, at times, several steps ahead of current scientific discovery. Overwhelmed by anxiety, flashbacks, nightmares and a terrible feeling of isolation, many sufferers think they will never again find the comfort of normality – but in 80 per cent of cases Gordon Turnbull and his team have helped them rebuild their lives. How they achieve this lies at the heart of his fascinating and inspirational story.

Location

CCL

WL