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Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World |  | Author: Richard F. Mollica
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Seller: pbshop
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 453007
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 0826516416
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.8521
EAN: 9780826516411
ASIN: 0826516416
Publication Date: December 29, 2008
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Product Description
In these personal reflections on his thirty years of clinical work with victims of genocide, torture, and abuse in the United States, Cambodia, Bosnia, and other parts of the world, Richard Mollica describes the surprising capacity of traumatized people to heal themselves. Here is how Neil Boothby, Director of the Program on Forced Migration and Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, describes the book: "Mollica provides a wealth of ethnographic and clinical evidence that suggests the human capacity to heal is innate--that the 'survival instinct' extends beyond the physical to include the psychological as well. He enables us to see how recovery from 'traumatic life events' needs to be viewed primarily as a 'mystery' to be listened to and explored, rather than solely as a 'problem' to be identified and solved. Healing involves a quest for meaning--with all of its emotional, cultural, religious, spiritual and existential attendants--even when bio-chemical reactions are also operative." Healing Invisible Wounds reveals how trauma survivors, through the telling of their stories, teach all of us how to deal with the tragic events of everyday life. Mollica's important discovery that humiliation--an instrument of violence that also leads to anger and despair--can be transformed through his therapeutic project into solace and redemption is a remarkable new contribution to survivors and clinicians. This book reveals how in every society we have to move away from viewing trauma survivors as "broken people" and "outcasts" to seeing them as courageous people actively contributing to larger social goals. When violence occurs, there is damage not only to individuals but to entire societies, and to the world. Through the journey of self-healing that survivors make, they enable the rest of us not only as individuals but as entire communities to recover from injury in a violent world.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
 New perspective February 9, 2010
Rosanna (California)
This book is pretty good...I'm still reading it, so this is only my initial reaction. It is definitely a new perspective in dealing with trauma...a refreshing one.
 Inspiring and Disappointing May 15, 2009
C. Macauley (Washington, DC)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
I have been an admirer of Richard Mollica ever since I heard him speak in Boston in 1987. His work with refugees and survivors of trauma is monumental and profoundly humanistic and his research contributions have improved our understanding of recovery immeasurably. So I had high expectations when I sat down to read Healing Invisible Wounds as a preparation for a course on trauma and recovery. Mollica is a skilled writer and the depth of his compassion for survivors resounds throughout this book. Unfortunately I often found the logic and evidence behind many of his conclusions to be flawed, although I feel confident that his overall thesis--that healing is a natural process and that medically-based treatment often interferes with it--is valid.
Much of the evidence Mollica presents is derived from his decades of experience with Cambodian refugees, among the most severely traumatized people in the world. Indeed, the gravity of their trauma is due not only to the horrors of the Pol Pot era but to grotesque human rights abuses they suffered while trapped on the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s and early 90s. Sadly, I found Mollica's description of Site 2 to be wildly inaccurate (I know, I was there): Contrary to his description, no one was "severely punished" for praying or writing letters and the camp did have businesses, temples and schools (Mollica says "inmates were forbidden to...go to school [p. 101]" when in fact over 77 thousand children and 10,000 adults were in school when he visited Site 2 in Oct 1988--which tells us how observant he was!). Nonetheless it was a cruel and hopeless existence for the 160,000 people who stagnated there behind barbed wire at the mercy of Thai border guards, and this is Mollica's point, that some of the worst trauma takes place after the traumatic events, and our misguided efforts to assist refugees and victims of war and violence can often make their problems worse.
Mollica describes an interesting experiment that he conducted with Cambodians in the US, intended to promote self-healing by encouraging diet, exercise and meditation. This is a superb example of the direction that trauma recovery should take, and the results are inspiring. However I had one nagging question: if self-healing is a natural process, why had these refugees not healed themselves, 20 years after Pol Pot and more than a decade after leaving the camps? Throughout the book Mollica implies that a patronizing, drug-dependent and arrogant health care system is often to blame, but he himself says that in most cases the subjects of this particular study had never received treatment. The answer is of course that "self healing" really only happens once survivors understand that it is not only possible but necessary. The subjects in Mollica's study began to heal as they realized that an active program of self-care could relieve their loneliness and depression. Self-healing may be "natural" but it doesn't happen by itself, as Mollica implies; it requires awareness and active implementation on the part of the survivor.
The chapter on interpretation of dreams was a breath of fresh air to me. I have long believed that dreams are significant in the processing of traumatic experiences, as is the act of telling the story, and Mollica's description of how and why these two phenomena are therapeutic is beautifully expounded. In particular, his prescription for how to tell the survivor story, focusing not on the horrifying details but rather on the meaning it holds for the survivor, is enlightening and useful, although hardly new (see Lennis Echterling's Crisis Intervention: Promoting Resilience and Resolution in Troubled Times). Mollica also has valuable insights on the importance of work for trauma survivors, as a means of social rehabilitation, and on the need for survivors to recover dignity in response to the humiliation many experience as part of their trauma.
As a result of this book I am now inspired to use story-telling and dream analysis in my own work with survivors, and to spread the word about self-healing and how to promote it. I believe that Mollica has made a major impact on the theory behind trauma recovery, and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.
 Healing nvisible Wounds February 6, 2009
Ten Zheng (Charlotte, NC)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World
In this dangerous world and in the affairs of Man's inhumanity to man, no one has a better perspective on the damaging effects of war, starvation, torture, natural disasters on the human psyche as does Dr. Mollica. For anyone working in resettling our newest residents, our refugees and immigrants, this is a must read book for understanding and opening channels of communication across cultural and linguistic barriers.
Wonderfully Insightful February 3, 2009
Dr. Lieber (Boston)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I recently re-read this book, and it's amazing message of resilience and self healing, is even more profound the second time through. I can't recommend this book highly enough to be both practioners and lay persons. This work serves not as a therapy manual but as a wake up call to the world to respect the voices of survivors and help them heal themselves. It blends historical information, religious and spiritual practices with medical and psychiatric knowledge to help build a framework for true cross-cultural counseling. My only "complaint" is that I wish it focused more on the how and less on the why. However there is no better introduction than Dr. Mollica's text to understanding the power of self healing in refugees and survivors of mass violence.
More than a book -- a gift!!! May 25, 2007
Mick (New Haven, CT USA)
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
All too rarely, it seems, the public is privileged to receive a book that is neither text nor tome, but rather gift. Richard Mollica's Healing Invisible Wounds is such a gift - a gift of hope for all who inhabit this violent world. One of the most widely accessible books I have read, Healing Invisible Wounds speaks to clinicians, policy makers, survivors and all who wish to live responsibly toward their neighbor in an increasingly global world. Having developed international recognition as a leading researcher/scientist in the field of psychiatry and trauma, Mollica departs from hard, empirical science and turns his attention toward the grace-filled trauma stories of which he has long been the recipient in his work with refugees, torture survivors, and victims of disaster. Such a shift is not easy - evidence-based research exerts an indomitable influence on the practice of healthcare. Yet, with this book, Mollica demonstrates his commitment to individuals - real people struggling with real pain yet capable of real healing. In this book, we do not find statistical evidence to support hypotheses about the mental health sequelae of violence; instead, what we find are stories of people - Somaly, Dr. Nakas and Liz - whose resilience, spirit and grace lead readers to a newfound understanding of "healing."
As a religious professional, I cannot recommend this book enough to clergy, congregations and individuals seeking to make an active, faith-based commitment to their communities. Resounding throughout Healing Invisible Wounds is Mollica's dedicated attention to the powerful force of spirituality, empathy and narrative in regards to healing. Were I to attempt to re-energize an adult faith study at my church, this is the book with which I would begin - inspiring, courageous, visionary and hopeful, Mollica's gift to us is one to be read, discussed and shared for years to come.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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