I am a Professor of Clinical Psychology at The University of Queensland, Australia. I recently released my memoir “The Trauma Banquet”. In this book I share about my ACEs and how I learnt to be resilient in the context of their enduring pervasive echoes.

I have been practicing psychology for almost 40 years and I have engaged thousands of clients in psychotherapy. As a full professor I have also been teaching psychology and conducting research, which has focused on building resilience in the face of adversity. I have 160 research publications and there are over 7000 citations of my work. I have also developed resilience training programs that are used internationally. In my memoir, I integrate my lived experience of ACEs with my clinical, research and teaching insights.

I wrote the memoir because I believed that I could use my personal experience of coping with ACEs to effectively demonstrate cutting edge resilience building techniques that have recently emerged in clinical psychology. My aim was to write a book that would serve as a mental health resource for people with ACEs and other life challenges.

My memoir provides a raw and gutsy exposure of personal resilience in the face of the lingering echoes of my childhood traumas: domestic violence, bullying, intimacy with my mother’s suicide, and alienation from gender and sexual diversity. This early childhood adversity led to a roller-coaster of drug addiction and homelessness in young adulthood.

The book ends with an examination of resilience processes that I inadvertently committed to as a child and which were later validated by science. I learned that the very thing I wanted to run from, my inner pain, was the very thing that invigorated my life. I describe my moment-by-moment use of strategies that enable me to embrace my pain, savour life and pursue my passions. These are the same evidenced-based techniques I encourage my clients to practice.   

You can visit my author website to obtain more information about me and my book: www.kenneth-pakenham.com

Kenneth Pakenham PhD.