A Voice for Independent Authors

“You can kill a book quicker by your silence than by a bad review.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

REVIEWING TODAY: A CLINICIAN’S JOURNEY FROM COMPLEX TRAUMA TO THRIVING BY REV. SHERI HELLER, LCSW

An important thing to know when entering LCSW, Rev. Sheri Heller’s comprehensive and analytically deep book, A Clinician’s Journey from Complex Trauma to Thriving is that this is not a self-help book; it does not prescribe a process for healing complex trauma, except to emphasize the necessity for professional, skillful, and compassionate clinical therapy. With that understood, this truly insightful and informative book – a collection of individual articles addressing specific forms of complex trauma and its consequences – does much more than just describe the often-debilitating symptoms presenting from a wide variety of personal and social traumas. A testament to the richness of the information is the degree to which the reader is drawn into and held fascinated by the altered psychological realities presented here – the individual causes of which are due to some form of personalized, traumatic history.

About one-third of the way into A Clinician’s Journey from Complex Trauma to Thriving, the reader, still fascinated but left hungry from all the highly informative yet appropriately emotionless discussion – finds LCSW, Rev. Sheri Heller providing a chapter (article) entitled – An Orphan’s Memorial to her Dying Mother. After wandering through a complex but arid desert peopled sparsely with floundering, symptomatic victims, a tidal wave of emotion now engulfs and overwhelms the thirsty reader. The point of this wonderfully emotional chapter becomes ultimately that of the book itself (beyond creating a symposium for other therapists): to provide the necessary knowledge and a chance for self-recognition such that the unduly suffering soul might then consider the journey from complex trauma to thriving to be an identifiable, do-able aspiration.