Little Book of Trauma Healing: When Violence Strikes and Community Security Is Threatened

How can we effectively address the threat of terrorism? What helps being about long-term security? What stops cycles of victimhood? What role can Restorative Justice play?

Following the staggering events of September 11, 2001, the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University was asked to help, along with Church World Service, to equip religious and civil leaders for dealing with traumatized communities. The staff and faculty proposed Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) programs. Now, STAR director, Carolyn Yoder, has shaped the strategies and learnings from those experiences into a book for all who have known terrorism and threatened security. Topics covered include:

• Trauma as a call to change and transformation
• Societal or collective trauma
• Trauma affects us physiologically
• Ongoing Trauma
• Limitations of defining unhealed trauma through a PTSD frame
• Incomplete grieving
• Acknowledgment
• Reconnection
• Prevent trauma by learning to wage peach
• And much more.