We meet six-year old Dominique, traumatized by the Northridge Earthquake, who needs solutions to her anguish, not theories or explanations.   Parents, teachers, and doctors learn easy, practical measures to help relieve a child’s fearfulness.

Hank, a firefighter is recovering from smoke inhalation. His wife, Joyce, sits at his bedside as he recovers. For weeks, horrific memories of the Vietnam War interweave with images of being trapped by the Oakland firestorm. We learn how trauma effects emergency workers and their families, and how depression is often a normal reaction.

Through these and other stories of families, teens, and seniors, myths are uncovered and readers get sound new direction: Avoid anyone, psychologists, tv experts, and do-good advisers, who say you must "relive" and "go into" your anguish or you won’t recover. It is one thing to recall past horrors from a safe distance of many years, it is quite another to relive shocking events while recovering from the current one.

Victims and non-victims alike learn the frequently overlooked signs of trauma and what to do during the acute phase of emotional shock. Coping and moving beyond the acute phase works best when you use the right "tactics," tactics that are found is this book. These tactics tell you what to do to build the strategies you need. They offer a solution, not a philosophy, differing from traditional counseling in three profound ways: Putting you in charge, making you the expert on your needs, and letting you devise your own solutions.

Ilana Singer, the author, wrote" The Therapist Column," for three years which was published in the East Bay Phoenix Journal for the Oakland-Berkeley firestorm community. She interviewed victims of the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes, Hurricanes Andrew and Opal and the Midwest floods. Also, she has debriefed police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers. She has treated personnel of large and small businesses who have suffered emotional trauma ranging from bank robberies to suicides to vehicular accidents.

Ilana Singer is a Professor of C-CTherapy® and co-owner of the Center for Counter-Conditioning Therapy® in Oakland, California. Her work at the Center, a non-medical mental health clinic, covers mental trauma and all other mental health problems. As a Clinical Ethnologist, she works in the field of aberrant human behavior, teaching people more efficient ways to mentally cope. Her methodology applies a non-cognitive treatment design based on C-CTherapy® and its three decades of field practice, all described on the Center’s website www.c-ctherapy.org.

Emotional Recovery After Natural Disasters: How To Get Back To Normal Life, published by Idyll Arbor, Inc., (Phone 1-425-432-3231), ISBN 1-882883-43-8 can be purchased through local bookstores or Amazon.Com