Transcending Trauma

Based on twenty years of intense qualitative research, Transcending Trauma presents an integrated model of coping and adaptation after trauma that incorporates the best of recent work in the field with the expanded insights offered by Holocaust survivors. In the book's vignettes and interview transcripts, survivors of a broad range of traumas will recognize their own challenges, and mental-health professionals will gain invaluable insight into the dominant themes both of Holocaust survivors and of trauma survivors more generally. Together, the authors and contributors Sheryl Perlmutter Bowen, Hannah Kliger, Lucy Raizman, Juliet Spitzer and Emilie Scherz Passow have transformed qualitative narrative analysis and framed for us a new and profound understanding of survivorship. Their study has illuminated universal aspects of the recovery from trauma, and Transcending Trauma makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how survivors find meaning after traumatic events. Accompanying Transcending Trauma are downloadable resources of full-text life histories that documents the survivor experience. In seven comprehensive interviews, survivors paint a picture of life before and after war and trauma: their own feelings, beliefs, and personalities as well as those of their family; their struggles to deal with loss and suffering; and the ways in which their family relationships were able, in some cases, to mediate the transmission of trauma across generations and help the survivors transcend the trauma of their experiences.

Bea Hollander-Goldfein, Ph.D., LMFT is codirector of the Postgraduate Certificate Program in Marriage and Family Therapy, director of the Transcending Trauma Project, and senior staff therapist at the Council for Relationships at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is also a clinical assistant professor at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, USA Nancy Isserman, Ph.D. is codirector of the Transcending Trauma Project at the Council for Relationships at the University of Pennsylvania and associate director of the Feinstein Center in Philadelphia, USA Jennifer Goldenberg, Ph.D., LCSW is a clinical social worker in private practice in Bangor, Maine, USA

Part I: The Transcending Trauma Project. Goldenberg, Isserman, Hollander-Goldfein, Introduction: The Transcending Trauma Project. Goldenberg, Hollander-Goldfein, Resilience After Prolonged Trauma: An Integrated Framework. Isserman, Making the Unmanageable Manageable: Innovative Tools for Analyzing a Large Qualitative Dataset. Part II: Survivors and the Impact of Pre-war Family Dynamics on Post-war Lives. Goldenberg, "The Biggest Star is Your Mother": Prewar Coping Strategies of 18 Adolescent Survivors. Goldenberg, The How and Why of Survival: Causal Attributions and the Search for Meaning. Isserman, "If Somebody Throws a Rock on You, You Throw Back Bread . . .": The Impact of Family Dynamics on Tolerance and Intolerance in Survivors of Genocide. Goldenberg, A Minyan of Trees: The Role of Faith and Ritual in Post-war Coping and its Relevance to Working With Trauma Survivors. Part III: Parenting Patterns. Isserman, Hollander-Goldfein, Raizman, Parenting in Survivor Families: Critical Factors in Determining Family Patterns. Hollander-Goldfein, Isserman, Raizman, "Like a Bridge Over Troubled Waters": Divergent Parenting and the Mediating Influence of Positive Parental Attachment. Part IV: Intergenerational Transmission to the Children of Survivors. Bowen, Spitzer, Passow, "The Elephant in the Room": Survivor Holocaust Communication With Their Children. Kliger, Hollander-Goldfein, Holocaust Narratives and Their Impact on Adult Children of Survivors. Hollander-Goldfein, A Systemic Perspective of Coping and Adaptation: The Inextricable Connection Between Individual and Family. Appendix One: Demographics of the TTP Dataset.