MaryCatherine McDonald – författare

A groundbreaking, accessible guide to the identifying the key ways trauma prevents joy and hope, with strategies for healing.Joy does not exist only in the moments that are free of pain. In fact, the brightest, tiniest, most important pieces can only be found in the dark. I want to teach you how to harness and amplify the power of that glinting magic--because this sustainable, endless light source will do more than help you get through your darkest, scariest, loneliest times.In The Joy Reset, Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald identifies the six common barriers that prevent us from accessing joy--hypervigilance, emotional numbing, fear of loss, conditioning, guilt, and shame--and then redefines positive emotions as those tenacious, gritty, often tiny experiences that appear within the darkest moments and form the very foundation of psychological resilience. Rooted in the neurobiology that explains how trauma and suffering affect us, Dr. McDonald shares exercises that make joy and gratitude bite-sized and accessible. By emphasizing the very real ways that joy and hope show up even in our toughest moments, The Joy Reset empowers you to find the light in the dark--no matter what.

Despite the fact that we have been studying posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) since at least the late 1800s, it remains prevalent and, in many cases intractable. Merleau-Ponty and a Phenomenology of PTSD: Hidden Ghosts of Traumatic Memory begins with the assertion that we struggle to successfully treat PTSD because we simply do not understand it well enough.Using the phenomenological approach of Maurice Merleau-Ponty – which focuses on the first-person, lived experience of the trauma victim – Merleau-Ponty and a Phenomenology of PTSD: Hidden Ghosts of Traumatic Memory focuses on reframing our understanding of combat trauma in two fundamental ways. First, the concepts of embodiment and adaptation give us an understanding of the human being as fundamentally adaptive. This allows us to view traumatic responses as adaptive as well. When the roots of traumatic injury become reframed in this way, combat-related PTSD can be understood more accurately as a set of symptoms borne of strength and survival rather than weakness or disorder. Second, phenomenology reveals that a different ghost haunts those who are afflicted by trauma. For the past century, trauma studies across disciplines have all assumed that the ghost of a singular traumatic event haunts the sufferer. While this is likely a part of the problem, further study shows that those who suffer from trauma are also haunted by the specter of a world without meaning. In other words, phenomenology reveals that what is injured in trauma is not just the mind or the body but the entire worldview of the individual. It is this aspect of the injury – the shattering loss of one’s blueprint of the world – that is missing from other accounts of trauma. Rather than aim to upend previous research in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, Merleau-Ponty and a Phenomenology of PTSD: Hidden Ghosts of Traumatic Memory uses the phenomenological approach to bring them together and expand then. It is in this expansion that we are able to consider what we may have previously missed – which stands to improve our understanding and treatment of trauma in general.

In American and NATO Veteran Reintegration, MaryCatherine McDonald and Gary Senecal examine mental health issues among former American service members. Data shows that American veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at significantly higher rates than veterans in other NATO ally countries involved in the war in Afghanistan. McDonald and Senecal argue that sociocultural factors, such as military training and civilian culture, have a dramatic impact on these rates.