Holding Onto Air

A top mental health writer, trauma researcher, and survivor illustrates how to successfully recover from lost innocence using a novel approach of rebuilding your sense of past, present, and future after the trauma event.

After experiencing two heart attacks at the age of 33, DeMarco knows trauma intimately. Trauma breaks your relationship with time by upending your expectations, destroying your innocence, and fracturing your memories. Holding Onto Air challenges common notions that we can simply think our way out of grief or despair and back to a “normal” happy life when the unimaginable shatters it.

By leveraging advances in emotion science, somatic psychology, neuroscience, trauma research, and by augmenting cognitive-behavioral approaches, she is able to address the body, spirit, and mind. Through this, she presents a truly holistic approach to building resilience, restoring a sense of time, and recovering from lost innocence—the realization of evil, pain, or mortality that occurs after an individual experiences trauma.

More than a rudimentary map for navigating grief and loss’ rocky terrain, with tired tropes and shop-worn strategies, this book offers a survivor-to-survivor guide for an arduous journey every human being will eventually have to face.