“A compelling, profound, and deeply personal exploration of our past’s unending impact on our present, Yesterday Never Sleeps provides invaluable insights and answers for the victims of PTSD and other childhood traumas.”
—Michael B. Oren, PhD
About Jacqueline Heller
Dr. Jacqueline Heller is a physician with board certification in psychiatry and neurology and is a psychoanalyst. Over her forty-year career, she maintained a psychiatry practice and treated patients at a community clinic. Dr. Heller was an assistant clinical professor at the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences within the David Geffen School of Medicine. She taught and supervised psychiatrists in training.
About Yesterday Never Sleeps
Befriending our inner mind with curiosity opens the way to secure attachments, empathy, and intimacy.
Because relationships dominate our inner world, knowing what we feel, and what we think about how we feel, cultivates self-awareness and acceptance. We learn to respect that others have their minds; we stop blaming and seeking scapegoats. Self-reflection, a learnable skill, links raw emotion–the kind we feel in our hearts and guts–to past events and behavior patterns. Knowing the story behind our painful feelings soothes and regulates our emotions so we can think before we act. Creating and updating a lifelong self-narrative—including the good, the bad, and the ugly—are the cornerstones for gaining wisdom and loving-kindness, qualities that interrupt cycles of trauma. The brain creates new neural connections during these processes, improving emotional health and cognition.
Praise
“Dr. Heller has achieved something extraordinary: a scientifically grounded, immensely readable summary of the workings of memory.”
—Joshua M. Greene, New York Times bestselling author of Unstoppable
“Dr. Jacqueline Heller is a compassionate, erudite, and experienced psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. In this elegant volume, she offers rich and nuanced clinical encounters, playfully innovative treatments, and contemporary psychodynamic theory conveyed in plain English…”
—Joel Yager, MD, Professor emeritus, Department of Psychiatry, University of Colorado School of Medicine
“Dr. Jackie Heller’s book provides a remarkably accessible summary of the core principles of psychoanalytic/psychodynamic therapy and demonstrates convincingly why these principles are crucial for profound personal growth.”
—Michael J. Gitlin, MD, Distinguished professor of clinical psychiatry, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA
“Yesterday Never Sleeps offers hope to those for whom hope seems only a passing shade on their journey through the underworld. What an extraordinary gift Jackie Heller has given us!”
—Elyn R. Saks, JD, PSYD, Orrin B. Evans distinguished professor of law; professor of psychology, psychiatry, and the behavioral sciences, USC Gould School of Law
“Heller takes us on a poignant journey into her life as a daughter of Holocaust survivors.”
—Abraham Foxman, Holocaust survivor, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League
“This book is powerful, well-written, and just WOW! This is a book you can’t put down, with essential insights and suggestions about improving our lives on every page.”
—Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, Director of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research
Featured Video & Podcast
Stories Survive, Museum of Jewish Heritage
A Tribute to My Mother
My late mother, Fanya Gottesfeld Heller was born in 1924 and raised in a small Ukrainian village in a stable, traditional Jewish home environment. She benefitted from a secure connection to her parents, especially her adoring and empowering father, who lauded her smarts and bookishness.
Her nuclear family narrowly escaped extermination by the Nazis with the help of two Christian rescuers. Initially they hid behind a farmer’s chicken coop, but for two years squatted underground in a small ditch dug beneath a drinking trough. With barely any food and little protection from freezing cold winters and stifling hot summers it is miraculous- unfathomable, that four people survived in that dark, cramped, lice and rat-infested ditch.
