Synopses & Reviews
Through the lens of a personal narrative, Creating Sanctuary makes some broadly challenging statements about human nature and social organization. Dr. Sandra Bloom, a psychiatrist, interweaves the individual and the social, the personal and the political, by presenting the story of how she and a group of friends and colleagues created a traditional psychiatric milieu based on social psychiatry principles. After years of working in this setting, the experienced a paradigm shift when they began to recognize the power of unresolved trauma in the lives of their patients and transformed their setting into a laboratory for social change. This new setting became the known as The Sanctuary, a psychiatric inpatient program for adults who have experienced severe trauma as children. The focus of Creating Sanctuary is less on how the staff treated the patients and more on what the contact with severely wounded people taught the staff.
Through their experience, Bloom and her colleagues have come to believe that unresolved, mulitgenerational, often forgotten traumatic experience leads to a compulsion to repeat that is an exceedingly powerful force in individual and social history and is a central behavior. Because of this unresolved legacy of trauma passed on from parent to child, all of our social systems are trauma-organized, producing institutions which are unresponsive to and often directly counter to human needs. Bloom applies the insights from The Sanctuary model to a multitude of social institutions ranging from families, schools, and the justice system to businesses, government, and the arts.
Creating Sanctuary presents the thesis that effective social reconstruction can only be effective if we understand the biological, psychological, social, and moral legacy of trauma and if we develop a practice that takes into account basic human needs for connection, empathic resonance, and most importantly, for the creation of safe, non violent environments.
Synopsis
Creating Sanctuary makes some broadly challenging statements about human nature and social organization. Dr. Sandra Bloom interweaves the individual and the social, the personal and the political, with the story of how she and a group of friends and colleagues created a traditional psychiatric milieu based on social psychiatry principles. Bloom and her colleagues have come to believe that unresolved, multi-generational, often forgotten trauma leads to a compulsion to repeat that is a powerful force in individual and social history. Because of this unresolved legacy of trauma, all of our social systems are trauma-organized, producing institutions which are unresponsive to and often directly counter to human needs.
Creating Sanctuary presents the thesis that effective social reconstruction is only effective if we understand the biological, psychological, social, and moral legacy of trauma.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [269]-290) and indexes.