Writing

The Joy Reset

In The Joy Reset, Dr. McDonald helps readers identify barriers that prevent them 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 and why trauma and suffering can impede our path to hope and joy, Dr. McDonald shares exercises that make joy and gratitude both bite-sized and accessible, inviting readers to welcome these emotions back in. By emphasizing the very real ways that joy and hope show up even in our toughest moments, The Joy Reset empowers readers to find the light in the dark—no matter what.

Unbroken

For centuries, we’ve been taught that being traumatized means we are somehow broken―and that trauma only happens to people who are too fragile or flawed to deal with hardship. But as a researcher, teacher, and survivor, Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald has learned that the only thing broken is our society’s understanding of trauma.

“The body’s trauma response is designed to save our lives―and it does,” she says. “It’s not a sign of weakness, but of our function, strength, and amazing resilience.”With Unbroken: The Trauma Response Is Never Wrong, Dr. McDonald overturns the misconceptions about trauma with the latest evidence from neuroscience and psychology―and shares tested practices and tools to help you work with your body’s coping mechanisms to accelerate healing.

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.

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.

Merleau-Ponty and a Phenomenology of PTSD: Hidden Ghosts of Traumatic Memory

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.

American and NATO Veteran Reintegration: The Trauma of Social Isolation & Cultural Chasms