Resources: Trauma and Its Healing

Selected Videos

How to Understand and Heal Emotional Trauma-daniela-sieff

Understanding and Healing Emotional Trauma

Live presentation to the Royal Society of Arts, 2015

An introduction to the widespread impact of trauma, the misunderstandings surrounding it, and what we need to know to work with it more effectively.

Healing Trauma

Revising Inner Stories: A Model for Healing Trauma

On-demand video presentation, 2024

An exploration of how trauma shapes our inner stories and how revising them supports self-understanding, healing, and growth.

Selected Writing

understanding and healing emotional trauma

Understanding and Healing Emotional Trauma

Book, 2015

Ten conversations with pioneering clinicians and researchers explore how emotional trauma is created, experienced, and healed, drawing on depth psychology, neurobiology, and evolutionary thought. 

Marion Woodman, Donald Kalsched, Tina Stromsted, and Bruce Lloyd offer perspectives from depth psychology. Allan Schore, Daniel Siegel, and Ellert Nijenhuis provide neurobiological insights. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Randolph Nesse, and James Chisholm contribute evolutionary viewpoints.

(c) Daniela Sieff, 2024

Revising Inner Stories: A Model for Healing Trauma

Essay, 2024

An illustrated exploration of how trauma shapes our inner stories and how revising them can support self-understanding, healing, and growth. It is a written version of the presentation.

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What Makes Emotional Trauma? Fear, Disconnect and Shame

Interview with Daniela Sieff, 2016

This interview introduces my concept of the “trauma-world”, explaining what it is and how it develops in response to overwhelming emotional pain and fear.

Marion Woodman

Image credit: Origianl photo © Vernessa Foelix

Trauma-Worlds and the Wisdom of Marion Woodman

Article, 2022

An exploration of how early trauma creates a “trauma-world” and of how the embodied approach to inner work, developed by Marion Woodman, Mary Hamilton, and Ann Skinner through BodySoul Rhythms®, can help us work with our trauma-worlds and move beyond them.

Unlocking the Secrets of the Wounded Psyche

Unlocking the Secrets of the Wounded Psyche

Interview with Donald Kalsched, 2008

In this widely circulated interview, Donald Kalsched explores the inner world of trauma and the powerful psychological defences that protect the wounded psyche, but can ultimately imprison it.

Essays and Reflections

Fostering Life After Trauma

Building Self-Trust Following Trauma

Fear Created by Trauma Often Operates Unconsciously

How to address the self-fulfilling prophecies of fear created by trauma

Persephone’s Tor (in Women on Nature)

Authenticity – are you going to be real?