The HEART Model: An Integrated Faith-based and Psychological Approach to Heal from Trauma and Produce Balance in the Mind, Body, and Spirit

What is possible when psychological research and techniques for treating trauma partner with the healing power of God?

In cases of dissociation, people’s hurt and trauma—whether emotional, physical, or sexual—become encoded into their mind and body at various levels. Therapists have the weighty responsibility to diagnose their clients properly and offer them the optimal tools, for their situation, to pursue healing.

The HEART (Healing Emotional Affective Responses to Trauma) Model offers a spiritual framework, from a Judeo-Christian worldview, designed to work with those who have experienced traumas and hurts. This faith-based model utilizes and complements existing, secular models of treatment. Its purpose is to help clients who have traumatic, painful memories of the past find themselves and establish a real connection to a living God.

In Dr. Benjamin Keyes’s meticulous, professionally oriented book, you’ll learn:

• Theory and methodology used in research on the HEART Model
• How to access and process suppressed traumatic events
• Addressing distortions of God
• Receiving forgiveness from self and God
• How to facilitate the client’s merge of dissociated parts
• The role God plays in recovering from trauma
• Effectiveness of the HEART Model for victims of human trafficking and complex trauma

Parts of a person can be, and often are, segmented, isolated, or disconnected from the conscious self. The inner healing process is designed to make it possible for the conscious self to reconnect to those disconnected places and achieve a greater sense of wholeness.

This reconnection to achieve completeness requires a journey to the center of the self, which will bring up significant issues from the past. But it also means reconnecting to a God who is alive and looking to be in direct fellowship with us. The ten steps of The HEART Model incorporate the spiritual dynamic to bring healing and balance to the mind, body, and spirit, in the one place they all reside: the heart.

Dr. Benjamin Keyes has worked in trauma for more than forty years. His experience has encompassed hospital, residential treatment, outpatient, and field settings. Dr. Keyes has worked with the entire dissociative spectrum, including borderline personality disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, and a variety of dissociative disorders. With the HEART Model, he proposes a potential best-practice approach to faith-based trauma treatment.