Unbroken: The Trauma Response

While trauma awareness has grown exponentially in recent years, we still tend to treat our response to trauma as a disorder or sign of malfunction. With Unbroken, Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald offers an empowering alternative: What if instead of seeing traumatic experience as that which breaks our spirit, we see it as that which proves our spirit cannot be broken? Here, McDonald offers a radical reframing of how we understand trauma—and a profound new approach for healing. According to McDonald, trauma occurs whenever we experience something that shatters our structures of belief about the world and our place within it. When trauma occurs, our miraculous biological systems adapt to help us survive—and sometimes this creates a constellation of mysterious symptoms that persist long after the event. If we can see these initial adaptations as natural strength responses, we come away with a new path to healing. We must tend to our neurobiological systems while we grieve our shattered beliefs and find new meaning, peeling away layers of shame as we go. Through an engaging combination of personal experience, client stories, and practical neuroscience, McDonald helps us better understand how trauma functions in body and spirit, guiding us from coping to growth. At the heart of the book lies a message of hope: trauma is unavoidable—but we are built to handle it.