Surviving Complex PTSD

Complex Trauma is a new phenomenon but enduring traumatic experience is as old as human history. This book tells the story of a family who endured abuse and control for many years. The tale is mainly told through the lens of the author but includes narrative from his very much younger brother.

The book poses the question of how well people adapt, survive and rebuild their lives when suffering chronic abuse and complex trauma and provides an amazing insight into how we as humans cope with the damage done to our mental, physical and spiritual health when living day by day with abuse.

This book would make essential reading for anyone working with trauma who is interested in the "nuts and bolts" of the abuse sufferer's storyline. Living through a trauma existence results in adaptation and dissonance between the sufferer and the potentiality of the person within, desperate to be understood and live a normal life. Equally, it is a secret life since no-one around them is aware what's happening.

Roderick Aungier brings his "wounded healer" narrative to his own life's experience of trauma and survival. He uses his own experience of gradual awareness that he has issues, to being in therapy and reflecting in therapeutic workshops just how maladapted he was. He reflects on how he adapted and then eventually managed the transformation into the person he always felt he had the potential to be.

Anyone reading this book should be able to get some insight into the changes and challenges that living with trauma brings and learn that it is possible to evolve and move on with the right awareness, tools and understanding.