This coloring book was conceived to bring healing to anyone who was\abused as a child.
Dr. Lacter has been observing “what works” to heal child abuse trauma for 40 years. This book shares these approaches in a fun, gentle, and hope-giving medium, a coloring book.
Each survivor possesses infinite resources of intelligence,creativity, sensitivity, and wisdom with which to heal. The messages and images in this book were developed to tap into these inner resources.
As the reader applies color to the images and lingers on their meaning, the value within the images can be gradually internalized to help each survivor pave a personal path for healing.
The book is printed on heavy weight paper suitable for most art media.
Each chapter includes a description of the issue addressed, self-care suggestions, ideas for creative expression, and a number of illustrations to color or paint.
The 17 chapters are:
- Safety
- Staying Grounded
- Self-Soothing
- Joy and Play
- Hope
- Reclaiming My Core
- Reclaiming My Feelings
- Reclaiming My Body
- Nurturing My Spirituality
- Self-Love
- Love
- The Beauty All Around Us
- Strength and Determination
- Embracing All Parts of Myself
- Healing Abused Parts of Myself
- Separating from My Abusers and Their Abuse
- Acceptance
Most images in this book will have value to survivors of all kinds of child abuse. Some drawings are specific to particular kinds of abuse.
There is some emphasis on ritual abuse since these survivors are so under-served and it is Dr. Lacter’s hope to increase in this small way the global consciousness that this kind of abuse exists.
Many images include “parts of self,” “inner children,” or dissociated identities or personalities.
The reader-artist is encouraged to interpret images of multiple selves in whatever way is most personally useful. For some survivors, “parts of self” are limited to different life roles or emotional states in the present day and the “inner child” is simply a memory of one’s self as a child. For others, more separate kinds of self-states formed as they broke off from the “core” or “original” self in response to overwhelming events.
The following is a review of this coloring book by Jean Maria Arrigo, Ph.D.
What is the source of this magical book of creative healing practices?
In these pages, Dr. Lacter demonstrates a fine attunement to the horrors of those who were hurt, exploited, and betrayed as children.
In each chapter, the hard-realist text grapples with the conundrums of the afflicted, then yields to calm pictorial resolutions to abuse, in which the colorer of the coloring book can join. Pass the paints and crayons!
Dr. Arrigo is recipient of the 2015 Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2013 American Psychological Foundation Lynn Stuart Weiss Lecture — Psychology as a Means of Attaining Peace through World Law, 2009 Anthony J. Marsella Prize for the Psychology of Peace and Social
Justice, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, 2009 James V. Mink Oral History Award, Southwest Oral History Association
Further information about the book, including sample illustrations and instructions for purchasing this book, are on this webpage: Color to Heal