Trauma & PTSD Self Help Workbook chapters cover aspects of a person’s life that need healing after trauma.
The 
Trauma & PTSD Self Help Workbook Introduction can be read here for your convenience. Both the Introduction and the contents page give you a very detailed overview of how the Trauma & PTSD Self HelpWorkbook can help you heal after all kinds of traumatic incidents. The Trauma & PTSD Self Help Workbook can be used on its own, but we do encourage you to also seek counselling.
The Foreword of the Trauma & PTSD Self Help Workbook -“Put together your own life: recover and rebuild your own life” can be read at the bottom of this page.
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. Rebuilding our sense of safety, security and control of our own life.
2. Redeveloping our trust of self, and in others
3. Belief in a future.
4. Strong support network of people who are able to accept the reality and allow the person to express troublesome feelings & thoughts openly.
- Establishment of a network of people who have knowledge and experience in management of post trauma effects.
- Self-care, information and counselling for family/friends.
- Other support, information, resources, eg. financial , legal
5. Acceptability of the person & their experience & effects.
- Increased celebration & acknowledgment of the achievement of survival, courage, self worth, efforts. Extra communication & feedback.
6. Development of a role that incorporates the experience and after effects.
- Stress management & Tolerance level identification.
- Learn to take it easy on yourself & ask for support or a break/rest.
- Resistance to risk taking behaviour, substance abuse or suicide as escape.
- Identifying what our triggers are.
- Lifestyle adjustments to accommodate changed abilities or difficulties incorporating needs for eg: predicability.
- Self empowerment–gradual challenge increases.
7. The essential of what helps at various stages after a traumatic episode.
- First few days …. To years afterward
- Children and traumatic stress management
- Young people
- Institutionalised children and young people
- Attachment theory
8. Connection with significant others.
9. Monitoring beliefs about self, other and the world and repair confidence.
10. Resolving guilt, anger, helplessness, loss of control and surrender.
- Guidelines for therapy
- Various types of therapy that can be useful in assisting trauma resolution.
11. Reconnection and re-entry>work, social, personal interest activities.
References
Index
Foreword
I first met Francess Day during the December 2003 Perth hearings of the Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care. As a counsellor and survivor of trauma herself, she agreed to be on hand should her skills be required for witnesses giving evidence. Harrowing and distressing best describe the experience of many witnesses as they finally are given a voice to tell of the often-horrific stories of assaults, abuse and neglect inflicted on them as vulnerable children in care.
In the course of my parliamentary work, I have become very aware of the long-term suffering that victims of childhood trauma typically endure. This emanates from initiating and being a member of two Senate Community References Committee Inquiries that have uncovered widespread child sexual assault and abuse. The first of these was the 2001 Inquiry into Child Migration, the report of which – Lost Innocents: Righting the Record – documents a dark and hidden chapter of Australia’s history. The second is the 2003-4 Inquiry into those I refer to as the ‘forgotten Australians’, those non-indigenous, non-child migrant state wards and home children.
Together with the 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Inquiry into the indigenous ‘stolen generation’, this trilogy of inquiries reveals that more than 500,000 children experienced out-of-home care last century. On leaving care, the majority of these people have been left scarred and damaged as adults with the cycle of abuse and cruelty they endured too often being passed on to the next generations.
The overall lack of justice and support for those who suffered in institutional care is scandalous. Most remain unassisted because they lack trust, don’t know where to go or remain paralysed by the circumstances of living dysfunctional lives on the margins of society. It is precisely people like this that will greatly benefit from this new book by Francess Day.
Additionally, Put together your own life will prove an invaluable aid for survivors of all forms of trauma who courageously choose to move beyond their pain and suffering in the quest to rebuild their lives. Together with her previous book, Putting together the Pieces: recovering and rebuilding life after trauma (2002), this workbook is a logical extension to assisting trauma survivors. By working through the various recovery strategies the workbook offers, it has the potential to redirect survivors on to a new life path, a new way of being.
Senator Andrew Murray
Senator for Western Australia