About the Author

Pamela Church has been in private practice since 1980. Her work is about establishing heart-mind-body consciousness that includes exploring defenses and the conditioning of the nervous system. She is the creator of Harmonize Now: Tools for Integration. The work is about strengthening embodiment, processing wounding and returning to the heart. Pamela Church has been speaking nationally at conferences on the subject of "The Loved Body" and the working of trauma residue in the nervous system for two decades.

Reviews

Pamela Church's book a Short Manual on the Big Topics in Psychotherapy is very true to it's title. She manages to cover some of the biggest topics in the field such as neuroscience, mindfulness, somatic awareness, and relational frame work in clear language that is at once accessible and personal. This book will be useful to a variety of readers- from patients who want an overview of what to expect in good therapy, to newer therapists who are wanting to be more wholistic, to seasoned therapists who are looking for support to integrate and articulate what they do in their consulting room. Ken Goldberg, MD Preventive Medicine Specialist and International Core Energetics Trainer
Our own body experience is one of the primary tools that a psychotherapist uses to help their clients. This book is about the whole person, not only the brain. It describes in depth how the mind, body, and heart connection can help to heal in therapy.Author Pamela Church has created a program called Harmonize Now, which includes tools that clients and therapists can use to self-regulate. These exercises use touch to regulate the body. They can improve gut health, release stress, depression, and anxiety and stimulate parts of the brain to function more or less. Toward the end of the book, readers are given illustrations of several of the exercises, which are simple yet mindful.Kristi Elizabeth, San Francisco Review of Books
The Kirkus Review:
A psychotherapist articulates a more holistic approach to healing trauma and restoring well-being. Church (Gestures of the Heart, 2004) argues that only a "unified self" truly experiences well-being and that "whole-person intelligence" is actually based in "a systemic model of heart-mind-body." Trauma and anxiety are not merely plagues of the mind, but disorders that reside deeply in the body, and so an effective therapeutic response requires more than merely talk therapy-a brain addled with emotional turmoil needs to be physically rewired. The author furnishes a detailed account of what such a comprehensive response looks like, which recruits the aid of "Harmonize Now Tools," strategies of visualization and somatic gestures designed to restore the brain's harmony. She explains-with the helpful use of Porter's (Bobbie the Wonder Dog, 2016, etc.) illustrations-the way in which various self-administered touches and movements as well as intentional visualizations can stimulate the parts of the nervous system and brain hobbled by trauma: "I am interested in the linkage between the brain stem, the limbic system, and cortical knowing. Or, in other words, listening to the body, feeling feelings, and being insightful, and the joy of bringing all three together." Church's approach is spiritually infused-there is no shortage of references to "The Divine" and the "Higher Self"-but also pragmatically empirical, insisting on discernible results as a guide to what works and what doesn't. The book isn't designed to be a replacement for therapy-in fact, it's principally addressed to other therapists, though the writing is so lucid it should be accessible to a wide audience. Even Church's lengthy and detailed discussions of neuroscience and physiology-both captivating and rigorous-are conducted in marvelously clear terms. But occasionally, the author waxes philosophic in a way that goes well beyond the scientifically demonstrable and is confusedly vague: for example, her understanding of the "luminosity" of the divine is more poetic than articulate. A refreshingly unconventional blend of science and spirituality.