Trauma Is Really Strange back

"The goal of this book is to be a non-scary introduction to trauma. For many people, understanding what the brain is trying to do protect them helps healing."

Follow up by the same creative team to the excellently explicative PAIN IS REALLY STRANGE. This time around chiropractor Steve Haines and illustrator Sophie Haines tackle the subject of precisely what happens to our brains when we experience traumatic events. Acute and chronic, physical and mental, our duo forensically break down the internal processes at work of how we respond neurologically and thus physiologically to such situations. Plus, as Steve states in the quote above, how we might be able to apply some degree of conscious control to improve the outcome rather than just being swept along by the tumultuousness of it all.

Steve, once again in talking head mode, thus diagrammatically takes us through the myriad different forms that trauma can take and what responses we can expect. As before, it's the incredible degree of symbolism and visual metaphor that Sophie puts into every single illustration which transform this from merely being a succinct and extremely clear explanation of the facts to a fun filled pamphlet of pictorial educational enablement. I think the beauty of this and their previous work is they manage to deal with such complex topics in a manner that would be perfectly digestible and understandable even for primary school kids without remotely compromising on the scientific facts. Brilliant!