Ptsdreams: Transform Your Nightmares from Trauma Through Healing Dreamwork (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780738770475)

Nightmares, especially those caused by trauma, not only disrupt your sleep but can leave you exhausted and on edge, haunting your daylight hours. With in-depth information on the nature of nightmares, international speaker, author, and psychotherapist Linda Yael Schiller shows you how to turn anxiety-filled or heart-pounding dreams into resources for spiritual growth. Her four decades of experience in both dreamwork and trauma treatment provide the reader with guidelines for turning PTSDreams into PTSG: Post Trauma Spiritual Growth.

Therapists, counselors, medical professionals, and healers of all stripes, as well as the general public, are often woefully unprepared to deal with their own or their clients' nightmares. Dreamwork and connecting the dots between dreams, nightmares, and a trauma history simply isn't taught in most professional graduate schools. We do ourselves and clients a disservice if we don't have the tools and methods to bring relief from this suffering. PTSDreams offers these tools, informed by Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) methods, to provide safe, non-triggering work and a Jungian active imagination approach that allows us to re-enter these dreams safely. This way, we can rework the dreams, resource the dreamer, and bring healing to both the nightmare and the root cause of the trauma.

When unaddressed, these dark dreams can follow us around in other forms, sneaking in through the cracks and fissures of our consciousness until they are finally faced, comforted, and healed. As Jungian analyst Dr. Yorum Kaufman taught, an inability to find a place for these memories keeps us shackled to a constrained, Sisyphean world whereby our movement into the future is thwarted by these "forgotten" memories that keep pushing us back down the hill. While retrieving these memories is a psychological issue, learning to live with what we remember is a spiritual process.

Who can benefit from addressing their nightmares? Victims of violence, refugees, veterans, childhood abuse survivors, victims of bullying and gender or racial violence, anyone with shattered or disrupted lives. Trauma can be personal, familial, ancestral, global, and environmental. Both current and historical trauma and stress can benefit from this healing work. Linda's technique is also being used internationally to help war trauma survivors.

Armed with effective techniques and Linda's warm compassionate voice, you can learn to safely heal post-traumatic nightmares and their root causes. She teaches the Guided Active Imagination Approach (GAIA), a method she developed based on best-practice trauma treatment and Jungian active imagination principles. Through compelling case descriptions and thoughtful exercises, you will learn how to apply a multiplicity of integrated and embodied dreamwork techniques. Linda also provides somatic, narrative, and psycho-spiritual approaches. Combining neuroscience, healing, mysticism, and creativity, PTSDreams helps you transform nightmares into a new story: one of hope, healing, and life-affirming images.