The Survivors Club, by Ben Sherwood.
Finished this, last week. Have been mulling over whether to recommend it or not. Some aspects of what he's trying to do with this book - determine what separates people (like us) who survive bad situations/trauma from the people who don't - seemed a little contrived and sorta beside the point. He's a journalist, first off - but he makes a point of directly interviewing and presenting the point of view of scientists, psychologists, religious folk, and of course, people who've survived some awful things. There's even an online test that's supposed to determine which 3 of 12 survivor traits are your strongest, in conjunction with the book. I found the test a bit long, but the result pretty self-soothing (even though I didn't agree completely with the results). It's sorta like the Meyers-Briggs - except it's your survivor personality. And there was one result I seriously questioned... it was contradictory... but that may have something to do with inner/outerness... the duality of public/private personalities that I think is actually a positive artifact of "surviving" for myself; but it does cause problems!
Anyhoo, while reading the book, I realized that it expanded my understanding of what surviving is... it gave me another perspective from which to view my own "story". Another way to think about it, than from the purely personal, emotional point of view. I decided to share because I think one of our biggest "issues" while healing, is that separated - "I'm not like anyone else" - "no one will understand" - kind of feeling. In the survivor's stories and what they thought helped them through... I could see bits & pieces of my own experience. Collectively, those stories and his summaries, sort set the criteria for another - what I call plateau - of fitting an experience into my life story; being at peace with it; and letting it fade out in importance - yet still inform my future self(s).
It reads like a collection of adventure stories, with analysis of the experience added in too. Then the meta-analysis provides a simple coherent picture... it's not a definitive "how-to" get better book by any means. But it has a lot in it, that I think we can apply to our own situations and maybe even reveal something important about us, that just didn't get talked about in T... or here... or even in our inner ramblings to ourselves.
Amazon has both the print and the e-book.
