Author: Don St John
Publisher: Paths of Connection
Paperback:
ISBN 10: 0997130105
ISBN 13: 978-0997130102
This is a groundbreaking book. Throughout his infancy and childhood, the author suffered severe physical and emotional abuse. He shares his personal journey and the disciplines, treatments and practices that enabled him to overcome the effects of severe maltreatment.
He studied as a professional each of these disciplines and treatments that helped him as a patient. Along the way Dr. St John had some life altering insights, such as:
-“Normal” is not nearly good enough.
-We have all been wounded to some degree or other.
-Most of can increase our ability to receive and absorb love.
-We can enjoy more life-giving love connections.
-We can improve our resilience, deal more effectively with stress, experience better health.
-We can expand our sense of who we are. -Because our bodies are mostly water, we can heal the deepest wounds to our psyche and go beyond what we can even imagine.
To make such changes we must address ourselves as a whole, which means not only our psyches, our personalities, our belief structure, our relationship capacities, but the fluids, tissues, structure and movement of our bodies as well. We are whole organisms, not just bodies with a mind.
Healing the Wounds of Childhood tells the reader where to look if she wants to grow into her full potential for good health and beautiful intimate relationships. Most self-help books focus on one area such as the brain, or communication skills. Healing the Wounds of Childhood provides the big picture.
This alone would make this a unique book. However, the book is sprinkled with autobiographical material, lending a very human story to this holistic presentation.
About the Author
Don St John, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist, somatic-relational teacher, coach, public speaker, and author. He is an authorized Continuum Movement teacher and Hellerwork Structural Integration practitioner and trainer. He has taught and given presentations in the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Brazil. Don brings two general qualifications to the authorship of Healing the Wounds of Childhood. The first, and perhaps most important, is that he has traveled the territory he describes, and he has accomplished an arguably miraculous level of personal change in one lifetime. As a psychotherapist, he works in a style that requires deep empathy and attunement with his patients. It is a level of emotional presence that he could not even have understood or imagined when he began his healing journey. As a Continuum Movement teacher, he teaches fluid movement. Again, this would have been unimaginable to him three decades ago. Thus, he has clearly walked what he talks. His second general qualification is that he has been immersed in both the psychotherapeutic and somatic therapy worlds for the past forty-seven years. His roots were in traditional clinical psychology, but earlyon, he realized from his own experience that the body must be included. Thus began his journey in both the psychotherapeutic and somatic realms. Dr. St John studied Gestalt Therapy at the LA Gestalt Therapy Institute and Neo-Reichian therapy with Drs. Allan Darbonne and Jack Lee Rosenberg; the Psychology of Selves and Voice Dialogue Method with Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone; Hakomi with Dr. Ron Kurtz; Coherence Therapy with Dr. Bruce Ecker; AEDP with Dr. Diana Fosha; and CIMS with Dr. Albert Sheldon and Beatriz Winstanley. He has taken immersion courses and core training in Dr. Sue Johnson's Emotionally-Focused Couple's Therapy. He is certified in Somatic Experiencing, the work of Dr. Peter Levine. He has also studied cranio-sacral therapy and for twenty years has been studying and practicing Continuum Movement developed by Emilie Conrad and Susan Harper. Don's doctoral dissertation, written at the Western Institute for Social Research, focused on the consequences of and recovery from relational maltreatment in early childhood. He lives in Salt Lake City with his wife of thirty years, Diane, co-founder of Paths of Connection. They have been teaching together for twenty-five years.
