Wounded I Am More Awake Chapter Summary

JULIA LIEBLICH and ESAD BOSKAILO, Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning After Terror. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012, pp. 158, ISBN 978-0-8265-1826-2 (pbk).

This engaging book takes the reader to the concentration camps set in the Bosnian war era which was the most horrific ‘genocide’ since the Holocaust. It provides the reader an insight into what it is to survive endless nights full of violence, both mental and physical and then to overcome those fear. This book is the account of Esad Boskailo, a Bosnian doctor who survived six concentration camps and went onto become a qualified psychiatrist in USA, written by Julia Lieblich. The book, a collaborative project of Esad Boskailo and human rights journalist Julia

The focus of the book is on Boskailo’s own quest of finding meaning after the trauma, which he found in working as a psychiatrist assisting other survivors. It’s basically about Boskailo’s approach to therapy, he calls it ‘integration’ (pg. 127). Boskailo says that success in therapy is not about decrease in symptoms but brining the survivor’s state of mind closest to the one before trauma. There are number of case studies of Boskailo’s patient that the author provides the reader with. These are very powerful stories and the reader is able to grasp the implications of terror. The reader also learn about the different ways in which terror affects a person and the person tries to live a different life in the aftermath of the horror. This sections also implies that medicine in the area of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has failed and is pretty limited. Pills alone are not able to help the PTSD patients. However in all of the cases, one thing central to the idea of ‘healing’ is finding meaning after terror. The survivor has to find a reason to live a new life, they have to finding meaning in things they have around them, for instance, their family, friends, work, and being active in society. For that, Boskailo tells us that the survivor must first acknowledge, what they have lost, and also try to recall the life before the trauma. In this section, Boskailo also focuses on the importance of the relationship between a survivor and therapist, and that it must be solely based on trust and giving them a sense of