Bruce St Thomas

Collective Trauma and Human Suffering: Energizing Systemic Change through Collective Healing Action provides readers with a compassionate and research-based framework for collective healing in an increasingly fragmented world. The text recognizes how the traumatic uprising of colonization and industrialized civilizations has subverted our foundational, social, and cultural knowledge of being human in favour of political, military, and materialistic needs for control and supremacy. The book outlines an original collective healing model that demonstrates how bringing intercultural communities together can integrate deep-seated trauma through collective resilience, healing action, and hope. Wisdom and knowledge of earlier world cultures has sustained the survival of human experience. This writing uncovers the ways in which systemic racism, natural disasters, mass trauma, agricultural development, slavery, control of resources, military power, and the evolution from village to the global has created fragmentation within our modern culture. Today, over half of the world's children do not have access to a healthy development. Readers will learn how the reclamation of interconnectedness, cultures, languages, and rituals can restore our systems prioritizing heart, humanity, and nature, thus infusing greater levels of human acceptance, compassion, communication, and love into the systems raising the future, our children.

Empowering Children through Art and Expression examines the successful use of arts and expressive therapies with children, and in particular those whose lives have been disrupted by forced relocation with their families to a different culture or community. The book explores how children express and resolve unspoken feelings about traumatic experiences in play and other creative activities, based on their observations of peer support groups, outreach programs and through individuals' own accounts. The authors argue that such activities in a safe context can be both a means of expressing trauma and a coping strategy for children to overcome it. This book combines personal and professional perspectives, using case examples as well as the authors' own childhood experiences, to demonstrate practical strategies for use with children, from drama and storytelling to sculpting with clay. It also equips the reader with knowledge of the theory behind these intervention techniques. This book will be a valuable resource for professionals working with traumatized children who have experienced loss, grief, relocation and other kinds of trauma.