Description
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.
B (verified owner) –
This author is extremely well versed on this subject and has years of experience helping others through her skilled methods using dreamwork. Her words are easy to understand , yet powerful in their content. We ALL dream, even if we dont always remeber them. This book can be helpful to a wide audience!
Teri M Muller
DK (verified owner) –
Schiller describes a deeply collaborative process between individuals and their partners in healing—one that attends to critical unfinished business and ultimately, leads to the processing of memories, a significant reduction in suffering, and a chance for profound meaning-making and posttraumatic growth. Her voice is compassionate and hopeful, conveying a sense of wonder and appreciation for the way the mind works. Through compelling case descriptions, thoughtful exercises, and a careful integration of clinical wisdom from the worlds of trauma treatment and dreamwork, Schiller skillfully introduces the reader to a wide range of strategies for addressing nightmares, transcending trauma, and finding relief.
Kimberly R Mascaro (verified owner) –
While written by a professional licensed therapist, PTSDreams is for more than that population. PTSDreams is insightful, offering support to those dealing with trauma and nightmares. I highly recommend this book – it would make an excellent gift to colleagues and loved-ones.
David (verified owner) –
This is a wonderful and fully engaging book about healing and transforming nightmares in various ways, including through the compassionate active guided imagination technique explained by the author. I highly recommend this book for everyone!
RadOwl (verified owner) –
A must-read for the treatment of nightmares. Her book offers bottled healing magic — I know because I’ve put it to good use already. The author obviously walks the talk as a therapist who knows how to help people with their nightmares.
Dreamer (verified owner) –
The breadth and depth of Linda’s knowledge and how she weaves the tendrils of other healing modalities with dream work is stunning.
Marcia LB (verified owner) –
This book is both relevant to anyone who has ever had a nightmare and in a therapeutic context for PTSD. Linda’s writing is deep and also accessible. Buy this book!
W (verified owner) –
Linda has a deep knowledge of dreams and how to transform nightmares into healing.
D. McLeester (verified owner) –
Excellent book, which shows clearly how Nightmares can be transformed from an annoying problem to a way into healing wounds and trauma. Accessible for all who dream.
Jill Vetstein (verified owner) –
So helpful as no one is with out dreams and nightmares. This book applies to all. Some people do not think they have trauma but really this book is for all people who ever had pain that shows up in their dreams. A must read to learn to work through it all.
Elizabeth Magidson (verified owner) –
PTSDreams is so full of important neuroscientific information, so full of clear explanations of the effects of trauma on the whole person, so full of beautiful poetic descriptions of the human experience (all told in a loving and encouraging style), that I will read it over and over again. Ms. Schiller also fills each chapter with excellent exercises to put the information to use in order to resolve hidden pain. An important reference book!
Allison C. Rimm (verified owner) –
This book offers information and exercises to help you tap into the healing powers of your nightmares for mind, body and spirit. It is written with compassion, warmth and wisdom.
Love to Learn (verified owner) –
This book was just what I needed to help my teenager get through some pretty tough nights. The author shows you how to discern what has happened in the dream so that you can bring to light issues that need repairing. It is very helpful.
P. Spielman (verified owner) –
This is a very practical and readable approach to addressing nightmares and the serious work to understand and change them. And really interesting reading!
Tzivia Gover (verified owner) –
Nightmares are by definition frightening, but they can also be our allies. In this book, Linda Yael Schiller offers clear guidance on how to navigate scary dreams to that they can help you heal and grow.
Bonny Doon consumer (verified owner) –
This book was incredibly valuable in giving me ideas about how to change my relationship to nightmares. Professional and yet easy to read. Highly recommended!
Natasha rinnig (verified owner) –
I highly recommend this book for insight and practical tips to reframe and eliminate nightmares.
Mia Woodford (verified owner) –
If there were a Court of Dreams, Linda Schiller’s new book would win hands down. In PTSDreams she teaches us how to examine and cross-examine our nighttime terrors. We are not their victims; they are our friends.
M. J. Woodford, JD, LLM
joyce Friedman (verified owner) –
What a great reframe of nightmares. This wonderful book helped me to deal with my own dreams and nightmares more creatively rather than to block them out of fear.
So important and inspiring to hear about other’s dreams and how the author worked with them. Excellent book.
David Schwartz (verified owner) –
Thanks to LindaYael Schiller for bringing her scholarly work together with the intuition of an artist and mystic. She has given language for something I had sensed and needed the support of wise words to more deeply trust. Nightmares are another voice of the Divine Dreammaker to bring truth and the creative into our lives. Thank you!
A (verified owner) –
This book not only delves into how we can heal from the messages in our dreams, but is grounded in years of professional psychological wisdom and experience. I learned so much by reading it. Linda combines the worlds of spirituality and science into a healing combination that helps free the soul to its natural state of joy.