Review – Your Life After Trauma by Michele Rosenthal

I was offered  the chance to review this book a long, long time ago. I kept picking it up and putting it back down, then picking it back up again a couple of moths later, and putting it down again. Part of that is just my busy lifestyle, with the work and the traveling. Part of it was also how much this book covers, and how deeply it gets into the topic. (The ebook is 312 pages, not a quick read!)

I don’t say this to scare you away from the subject matter, though. Quite the contrary. This book could be a very useful resource for someone trying to wrap their heads around trauma and how it affects you. The steps Michele takes you through are invaluable, but as someone reading it after having moved out of the target audience for the book, it can be hard to follow. (Not to mention having to pick it back up after time away! But that’s on me, not the book.) You’ll really want to be prepared to work through this book, but if you are ready to work through your trauma, this would be a good place to start.

The one thing I absolutely found myself in agreement with Michele about is the same thing that is written on the top of the book’s website: (Where you can read a sample)

You cannot go back to who you used to be or could have been.

The book then goes on to talk about the science of trauma and how it changes us, period. Once the reader accepts the core truth that they can’t go back to life before trauma, then the book will take them through the next steps; looking at who they were before the trauma, who they are now, and who they want to be. There are plenty of steps to each of those three processes, but again, the book has you covered, with tips and tricks on getting to the “post-trauma identity”.

Personally, I really identified with this approach because it was similar to the approach my therapist wound up taking with me. In a nutshell:

• Mourn the child you were before the abuse
• Recognize that you can’t go back to that child
• See what being an abuse survivor is doing to you now
• Figure out what you want your life to look like, and figure out how to make that happen

I didn’t have this book when I was going through that, but the ideas in it make a ton of sense to me. If you’re about to embark on that journey to identify what your life after trauma looks like, you could do a lot worse than having this as a resource.

It’s available on Amazon.

Have you read this book? What was your opinion?