As a trauma therapist with over 30 years' experience in helping people heal from traumatic childhoods, I value Nattel's respectful and sensitive portrayal of Sharon's in her struggle to live a normal life with DID.

Children don't suffer from sexual relationships with trusted adults?!! Normal memory function explains why they forget?!! What nonsense.

As a social work psychotherapist with 30 years' experience in treating victims of child sexual abuse, I know this isn't true. Child sexual abuse destroys trust, clouds the survivor in lifelong shame, makes it very difficult to form loving relationships with an adult partner - and in general, leaves the child with a heavy burden to carry through life. The closer the relationship with the abusing adult, the more damage is done.

As well as having a theoretical base for my opinion, I myself am the survivor of incest at the hands of my father and his father, my dignified old grandfather. My book Confessions of a Trauma Therapist: A Memoir of Healing and Transformation details the story of how my memories surfaced when I was in my late forties. Years of solid psychotherapy, yoga, Focusing, dream work and huge effort on my part, led to my healing and transformation. Today, thanks to all we know about child sexual abuse, I am a happy, confident woman.

For years I kept meticulous journals of how my memories began to surface. Anyone interested can find that in my book. I know. I experienced it.

Mary K. Armstrong, confessionsofatraumatherapist.comConfessions of a Trauma Therapist: A Memoir of Healing and Transformation

This artfully filmed story of life in a German village before the first world war presents a realistic picture of how well meaning parents raised their children. Discipline and obedience were all important. Shaming and harsh punishments were meted out for any failure to obey. The children in the story (filmed in black and white) walk about in a gang of seemingly well-behaved little robots.

Terrible things are happening in this village of obedient children and strict parents. The doctor is returning from his daily horseback ride when his horse trips and falls over a wire strung between trees. Someone has done this deliberately. But who? A mentally challenged child is found tied upside down on a tree, badly beaten. Another child is beaten in the same way.

The young man who is the school teacher begins to suspect the children. Their revenge smacks of punishment. He confronts two of the children in their home and is getting close to forming a suspicion in his mind. However, the respectable father intervenes and throws him out of his house. That ends any investigation.

The voice-over is the aged voice of the school teacher, now an old man looking back on these sinister events. What happened, he says, must have something to do with what followed in German history.

I found the film remarkable in many ways: beautifully filmed, well acted (how did they find an actor to play the mentally challenged child?) and thought provoking. What did German child rearing have to do with the events which followed, I had to wonder.
Confessions of a Trauma Therapist: A Memoir of Healing and Transformation

John Ratey brings us convincing and useful research findings about the absolute necessity for exercise in our lives. We have the same limbic system as our cavemen ancestors, he explains. Their brains and ours were designed to save us from attacks by wild animals. We, of course, experience stress from our jobs and our relationships. Fighting or fleeing is not a viable option.

The book is well organized, dealing with our ability to learn and achieve academically: to how we become depressed instead of acting out the fight or flight we need to respond to: to the connection between addiction and exercise.

This is a remarkable collection of wisdom. For example, older women who exercise are half as likely to develop dementia as their sedentary sisters. Chronic stress results in a whole bundle of illnesses. Staying well and keeping our brains sharp is a do-it-yourself project.

I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to live a healthier, more sane life.
Confessions of a Trauma Therapist: A Memoir of Healing and Transformation

In Raise Your Kids Without Raising Your Voice, psychologist Sarah Chana Radclilffe recognizes that good parents are at peace with themselves. Her book is filled with self-care wisdom and constant reminders that there are two people needing support in the parent-child relationship. The child has the parent to provide guidance. But what about the parent? This, says Radcliffe,is a job for the inner parent. Parents need to develop a part of themselves that speaks to them wisely and reminds them of the relaxation strategies they've learned in the book.

"When all is said and done, one of the most important ingredients in the building of a healthy home is parental self control." Blaming the child doesn't work. It's the job of the parents to make sure they have their own emotions and behaviour under control.

This is a practical book with plenty of tips for parents to access their own inner compassionate parent. It is organized to help parents easily seek the particular information they need. Radcliffe provides parents with a remarkable guide to effective parenting.

Mary Armstrong, MSW, RSW
Author of Confessions of a Trauma Therapist: A Memoir of Healing and Transformation
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Michael Crummey's book blends a mature sense of life's baseness and harsh realities with his fantastical, whimsical tale of life in the Newfoundland outport, Paradise Deep. A whale is beached and out of it comes a fully alive, naked man who eventually takes his place in the geneology of the village. As readers, we behold the births, mating and deaths of a complex cast of characters. Rollicking humor entertains us as the itinerant priest services the widow whose dead husband just won't stop taking his shadowy place in the village and beside his widow's hearth.

Thoughtfully, the author provides a geneological table for his readers, as the story covers several generations