Yellow Kite acquires guide to stress and trauma by Stanley

Yellow Kite has acquired a guide to overcoming stress and trauma by pioneering researcher Dr Elizabeth Stanley.

Liz Gough, publisher at the Hodder imprint, bought UK & Commonwealth rights from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein, on behalf of Lauren Sharp and Chelsey Heller at Aevitas Creative Management. Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma, will be published in trade paperback and e-book this September.

Stanley is an associate professor of security studies at Georgetown University, and holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT. An award-winning author and US Army veteran, she is the creator of mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT), taught to thousands in civilian and military high-stress environments.

The book’s synopsis explains: “In Widen the Window she argues that stress and trauma are not separate conditions; in fact, they have the same neurobiological basis. What distinguishes them is having a sense of agency. With agency, stressful situations become challenges. Without agency – or a sense of control – they can turn into trauma. Dr Stanley explains why an event that’s stressful for one person can be traumatising for another, and how, with training, we can access a sense of agency, even in extreme- stress environments.”

Gough said: “By systematically training our attention, using Dr Stanley’s MMFT programme, we can widen the window within which our ‘thinking brain’ and our ‘survival brain’ work together. In this way, Dr Stanley gives us the tools we need to recover from trauma and stress and begin to thrive again. Her book is going to help so many people, and I am really delighted to be publishing it here at Yellow Kite.”

Stanley added: “I’m so excited to partner with Yellow Kite to share MMFT’s resilience tools – as well as the scientific concepts that undergird these tools – with readers in the UK and the Commonwealth. It’s an honour to work with Liz Gough.”