Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Mental Health

Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, and Use It For Good [2021, PDF/EPUB, ENG]

by Kimberly Ann Johnson

(323 ratings)
Book cover

From trauma educator and somatic guide Kimberly Ann Johnson comes a cutting-edge guide for tapping into the wisdom and resilience of the body to rewire the nervous system, heal from trauma, and live fully.

In an increasingly polarized world where trauma is often publicly renegotiated, our nervous systems are on high alert. From skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety to physical illnesses such as autoimmune diseases and digestive disorders, many women today find themselves living out of alignment with their bodies.

Kimberly Johnson is a somatic practitioner, birth doula, and postpartum educator who specializes in helping women recover from all forms of trauma. In her work, she’s seen the same themes play out time and again. In a culture that prioritizes executive function and “mind over matter,” many women are suffering from deeply unresolved pain that causes mental and physical stagnation and illness.

In Call of the Wild, Johnson offers an eye-opening look at this epidemic as well as an informative view of the human nervous system and how it responds to difficult events. From the “small t” traumas of getting ghosted, experiencing a fall-out with a close friend, or swerving to avoid a car accident to the “capital T” traumas of sexual assault, an upending natural disaster, or a life-threatening illness—Johnson explains how the nervous system both protects us from immediate harm and creates reverberations that ripple through a lifetime.

In this practical, empowering guide, Johnson shows readers how to metabolize these nervous system responses, allowing everyone to come home to their deepest, most intuitive and whole selves. Following her supportive advice, readers will learn how to move from wholeness, tapping into the innate wisdom of their senses, soothing frayed nerves and reconnecting with their “animal selves.”

While we cannot cure the painful cultural rifts inflicting our society, there is a path forward—through our bodies.

.
Read more ▾

Book details


  • Author : Kimberly Ann Johnson
  • Publisher : Harper Wave
  • Published : 04-12-2021
  • Language : English
  • Pages : 288
  • ISBN-10 : 0062970909
  • ISBN-13 : 978-0062970909
  • Reader Reviews : 323 (4.7)
download Free Download
literature Read Online

info-popup This book is available for free download in a number of formats - including epub, pdf, azw, mobi and more. You can also read the full text online using our ereader.

  • File Formats : PDF, FB2, DOC, EPUB, TXT
  • Status : ● available for FREE download
  • Downloads : 3548

About the Author


Kimberly Ann Johnson


Kimberly Ann Johnson is a Sexological Bodyworker, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, birth doula, postpartum care advocate and single mom.

Kimberly graduated Valedictorian in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. She is the host of the Sex Birth Trauma podcast and creator of Activate Your Inner Jaguar: A Real World Understanding of Your Nervous System and Embodied Consent.

In private practice in Encinitas, CA, she helps women prepare for birth, heal from birth injuries, gynecological surgeries and sexual boundary ruptures. She also trains birth professionals, bodyworkers, and somatic therapists to help women with prolapse, incontinence, painful sex and other pelvic floor and gynecological issues. Her most outstanding accomplishment is being a single mom to fiery 13-year-old, Brazilian daughter, Cecilia.

.
Read more ▾

Reader Reviews

J
Kaydee
Good supplementary material for a healing journey
Reviewed in the United States on 06-02-2023
I bought this on Kindle, and do wish I had a hard copy. I started reading it right before taking Kimberley's 'Activate Your Inner Jaguar: Love and Relationships' I did find reading the book while doing the course helpful. I have also read other both positive and generative reviews on this book and I feel, yes this may be one person's option/retelling of existing teachings, and does not go too deep into theory. But I felt that made it accessible to an audience that haven't studied psychology or Somatic Experiencing.
On the other hand I tried to read The Body Keeps The Score, and found I struggled to get into it. this was a far more palatable read, and I do enjoy Kimberly's approaches.

Having rad up on Attachment theory previously I did find the simplified versions used in this book helpful with visualising the types, and would suggest supplementary material on it as well if you are interested. But this is a great introduction to that concept.

Overall I'm grateful for this, and the Chapter 6 walk through of a traumatic experience actually did help me re-program that trauma, and I feel so differently about it now than before. It has less power over me, and feels distant in memory, if still a bit unsettling.

Overall I would, and do definitely recommend this book..
Read more ▾
J
Caro
Call of the Wild is an invaluable resource for trauma recovery
Reviewed in the United States on 07-27-2021
In Call of the Wild, Johnson offers us an invaluable resource for understanding our nervous system in an effective and integral manner.
As an individual who has lived most of my life with severe chronic illness and eventually experienced full blown PTSD after a particularly traumatizing health crisis involving hospitalization with a neglectful and gaslighting care team, the understanding and assistance I have since been able to access in recovering my nervous system has fallen woefully short. I lived many years with this illness, yet after this particular event, I was completely changed. In my mind and body, life and self are sharply divided into before the event and after it. And in the near-decade since the physical event, I have never felt I’ve recovered from it, and have doubted it even possible. There has been little understanding or compassion for this from those closest to me or from my care teams. While I dearly appreciate the support my psychologist has offered me, as well as what I have gained through a gamut of healing modalities, it has all been exhausting, and clear that there have been big missing pieces.
Johnson’s work in Call of the Wild offers incredible relief even just in its expression and acknowledgement of what I’ve always known… that trauma lives in my whole body, it’s not all in my head, and its effects cascade into every area of life. The tools and understandings Johnson offers give me new, targeted ways to address my nervous system on levels that have long been ignored. While I’ve been able to gather bits and pieces about somatic healing around the net over the years, and have endeavored to give my body what it needs to feel safe, it has felt like grasping at straws, and I was never able to pull together anything as cohesive as what Johnson offers all in one place in this book. I recommend it as a valuable resource for anyone living with the reverberation of trauma who has not found sufficient understanding of their experience for themself or from others, and for anyone exhausting themself trying to do all the self care things all the time just to feel okay. As Johnson states on page ten, “We can respect our own physiology and make choices accordingly, instead of trying to cram ourselves into a model, diet, program, or method that seems to work for other people… Then instead of ‘training your mind’ or ‘eradicating negative thoughts,’ getting better might look like tolerating new environments, sleeping better at night, or forging better relationships.”
I look forward to living into the grounded shifts in my experience made possible with the somatic tools offered in this book, which get right to the heart of things..
Read more ▾
J
Kate White
A Must Read for Every Human Interested in Healing
Reviewed in the United States on 06-19-2021
Book Review: Call of the Wild: How We Heal Our Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, and Use It for Good by Kimberly Ann Johnson

Kate White, SEP

As a therapist and educator in helping people understand the physiology of their nervous system’s response to threat and stress, I want to praise the publication of Call of Wild by Kimberly Ann Johnson, not only for it’s straight forward and direct way of writing, but also for the granulated way it describes trauma resolution for those truly wanting to understand human health. Kimberly writes for an audience of those seeking healing from trauma, particularly women. I also write in praise of her voice as a woman, weaving in her life experience and considerable training as a bodyworker, yogi, mother and Somatic Experiencing practitioner (SEP).

Somatic healing work has many approaches that include the autonomic nervous system’s response to threat and stress. As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, I was taught to help people track their sensations in relationship to their feelings of safety and security, and what their body would have done to protect themselves in the face of threat, usually falling in the categories of flight, fight or freeze. There are layers and nuances in each category, including fainting, and fawning (now more commonly referred to as please and appease), or variations of dissociation, shut down, collapse in the freeze category or irritability, anger, and rage (and more) in the fight/flight category. In my work training practitioners, there are so many times when we activate these parts of ourselves every day, and in special circumstances. Categories here include assault, medical trauma, shock, developmental trauma, horror, and inescapable situations that happen every day. As an educator and a therapist, I help my clients identify their responses to overwhelming situations and help them heal these places with processes of integration.

Kimberly Ann Johnson has written a text that will help the reader identify their responses, and further catalog their behaviors, thoughts, and sensations. She has developed her own approaches to help people understand the nature of trauma and its legacy in our bodies and our lives. Each chapter has descriptions, exercises and maps for the reader. For example, in Chapter One: A Real-World Understand of the Nervous System, she defines our nervous system responses in detail and in plain language for the uninitiated in understanding threat responses. She outlines our places of safety and connection (Social Engagement) and then breaks down the nervous system responses into different categories: Fit In, Fawn, Fight, Flight, and Freeze, calling them emotional signposts of nervous system states under stress. She further delineates our nervous system responses in our bodies as tissue states, which I have not seen before. Are you very elastic in your body or are you chronically tight? Kimberly Ann Johnson helps you explore your body, nervous system states and responses so you can have a holistic picture.

The following chapters further break down your nervous system responses, and Kimberly gives you specific tools for healing and reflection. In Chapter Two, she offers the mnemonic TIMEs, Thought, Image, Movement, Emotion and Sensation. She invites you to also explore positive sensations and resilience, offering the specific tools well known in trauma resolution of presence and pendulation between what are positive sensations and more overwhelming ones. She provides many examples for the reader to explore their experience.

The book gives you ways to experience and explore our human/animal behaviors of predator and prey to improve your radar for safety and threat. Kimberly Ann Johnson invites you to find your own inner predator, including her own story of find her inner Jaguar. She describes her healing journey, and her trainings, including her interest in sex, sexuality, and trauma. Her exercises and sensitive writing invite you to explore your own tendencies and encourage you to stretch your ways of behaving and knowing. Examples in the book include showing your “fangs,” learning how to “roar,” exploring feeling bigger, tracking your system, understanding how you try to fit in, or fawn as ways to stay connected to your tribe.

Final chapters explore attachment and relationships, helping readers identify their early childhood tendencies in their caregiving relationships. These early relationships pattern our nervous system very early. Our biology is intimately connected with our mothers, fathers, and our family systems. I enjoyed Kimberly Ann Johnson’s description of the attachment styles. My only criticism of this book is that I wish the author had explored developmental trauma here, especially the category of disorganized attachment. Most of us who enter the healing arts do so to heal our early ruptures and traumas, and many of us have had challenges to our nervous system in this early childhood time. The chapter before conclusions in about sex and sexual freedom. It is a relief to be with someone who has such comfort and command when talking about sexual relations and our bodies. This is good medicine for the modern human, especially coming from an empowered female voice. Additional materials at the end of the book include all the exercises in one place so you can go step by step through a healing process, as well as vocabulary and descriptions of each of our nervous system states.

I highly recommend Call of the Wild. It will be part of my book list for upcoming courses in helping people understand their nervous system responses, and perhaps encouraging our health and connection to heal a world full of hurt. We can help ourselves and each other with books such as this and find our own inner peace and tools for understanding..
Read more ▾