Rebuilding Your Life After Trauma: A Coping Manual, by Aviva Perlo

For months—through surgery and rehab, through needing to re-learn how to walk, eat, and manage her body’s new limitations—Perlo longed for a book that would help her navigate the slow, unsettling recovery from trauma. Three decades later, she’s written the book she longed for: a plain-spoken, user-friendly, illustrated guide called Rebuilding Your Life After Trauma: A Coping Manual.

Translating trauma lessons

Perlo, 51, brings more than a searing personal experience to the table. She’s a social worker, health educator, improvisational artist, and founder of her own business, Creative Coping. There, she’s offered workshops and trainings for Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health, the National Association of Social Workers, and other schools, non-profits, and community groups.

It was after one of those groups—a session at the Free Library that included 25 participants, three with significant trauma experience, all of them sharing stories and learning from one another—when Perlo decided to translate those lessons to paper. “I don’t know how to edit video. I thought: the thing I know how to do is write a book. I could try to write up these lessons and put that in the world, easier than I could recreate this experience.”

Perlo uses “trauma” in the clinical sense, to mean a shattering experience such as surviving war or political persecution, experiencing a natural disaster, facing a terminal illness or enduring childhood abuse. “Trauma is not a bad hair day,” she says. “I’m glad the word ‘trauma’ came into the mainstream so people can know more about it than they did 30 years ago, and it’s important to have distinction about what it is.”

Finding the middle road

The book, divided into micro-chapters, each with an evocative color photograph, guides readers through the steps of filling foundational needs—food, sleep, exercise, social connection—rebuilding a meaningful routine and finding expression in art, writing, or movement.

“I encourage people to practice healthy habits now so when a crisis happens, you already have the habits in place and can build on them in your healing process,” she says. “It’s hard to learn new tricks during a shocking trauma.”

Perlo also touches on the family, cultural, and systemic roots of trauma and encourages readers to examine the stories they (or others) tell about trauma by asking, “Where is this story coming from?” and “Who benefits from this story?” Typically, survivors of trauma may drift either toward despair, feeling that they have no agency to determine what happens to them, or to the opposite extreme, an effort to control every circumstance in hopes of avoiding future harm. Perlo advocates a middle road. “It’s important to identify what can be controlled, so you can use your energy in the proper places,” she says.

In her own recovery, Perlo learned to ask for help; initially, she couldn’t carry her textbooks or lift a basket of laundry. She had to build rest into her schedule: a college class followed by a two-hour nap. She relied on her body’s resilience—prior to the accident, she played soccer and worked out several hours a day—and her innate stubbornness.

Meaning to heal

“A surgeon told me not to go back to college. I did go back, against doctor’s orders, which meant I had a structure in place.” She left Emory University, went home to Texas, and ultimately enrolled in University of Texas, Austin, where she discovered a love of writing and graduated with a degree in English. Later, she completed a master’s degree in social work at Temple University.

Throughout, she drew on her Jewish faith and practice, especially the teachings of psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl, who developed a theory of “logotherapy” or healing through the search for meaning. To Perlo, that means “that when you’re in a dark place, you can imagine yourself being useful for something in the future even though you’re not doing it then.”

When Perlo leads groups, she invites participants to share parts of their stories, offers clinical information about trauma and recovery and always includes some kind of creative expression: making music or movement or pompoms for a round of “human cheerleading.” She hopes the book will be an accessible guide for people to use alone or in groups, and that it may also be helpful for social workers and health care professionals. “One message I want people to take from the book: [whatever happened], there is something you can do. You are not completely helpless.”