Fortress Press

This book meets many needs as a textbook for spiritual care courses and clinical training for chaplains and religious leaders in any tradition. It focuses on the unique ways that spiritual caregivers can use a narrative approach to trauma care based upon Judith Herman's time-honored process of helping survivors practice safety, remembrance, mourning, and meaning-making. Its accessible language builds upon scholarship in pastoral care and research about the impact of trauma on the body and spiritual struggles. It describes a step-by-step approach that caregivers will want to return to over and over again in spiritual care of trauma.

The day before I opened Trauma-Informed Spiritual Care, I replayed the traumatic last minutes of my father's life, and grief took up residence in my heart. Danielle Tumminio Hansen's book gave me new language to reconnect with self, life-giving rituals to mourn, and theoretical frameworks to salve my healing wound. For this resource that moved me from head to heart, I am grateful. I give thanks that care seekers, therapists, and spiritual caregivers who pick up this book will take a similar journey.

Trauma-Informed Spiritual Care is an insightful, readable, and practical text that provides deep wisdom through accessible prose. Danielle Tumminio Hansen has written a gem of a book, ideal for courses on spiritual care, for CPE reading lists, for chaplains, religious and lay leaders, and others who seek to expand their capacity for spiritual care. Her invitational narrative style and easeful integration of theory and practice offer examples and case studies, activities and diagrams to help readers understand the effects of trauma and how spiritual care can support the journey to healing and justice.

This is a much-needed, deeply informed, accessible resource for guiding spiritual care providers privileged to walk beside survivors of trauma. Tumminio Hansen skillfully interweaves theoretical and clinical guidance that chaplains and parish clergy alike will be able to engage and employ. Importantly, she illustrates how experiences of embedded oppression, such as racism and sexism, amplify other forms of trauma and must inform practices of restorative justice and care. I highly commend this resource for MDiv and DMin classrooms and for ACPE, VA, and military chaplaincy training programs.