Paris, Céline: - Céline Paris is a psychologist practicing in Ottawa, Ontario. She has been treating people with PTSD, soldiers and first responders mostly, for more than 20 years. She saw a gap in the self-help literature on trauma and wanted to assist her colleagues and all those who deal with PTSD, directly or indirectly, make sense of it and find hope. In these pages, she talks to sufferers directly: she wants to take you by the hand, help you view your trauma symptoms with clarity and compassion, and see that the shame that holds back so many of you is baseless. PTSD is something you "have", not something you "are".

Over the last decade, public awareness of the disorder has increased greatly, and with it came a wonderful will to help. But PTSD is still not very well understood. Greater awareness appears to have come at a price: too often, a treatable psychological condition is equated with a chronic disability, a life sentence, an identity. But the author has seen first-hand what happens when people understand what is troubling them: they start to get a handle on it.