I met Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez—and became her developmental editor—about two years after her husband Tony died. No stranger to grief myself, I was deeply moved by Jennifer’s commitment to finding healing from this sudden, unexpected, traumatic loss. Her late husband was a mental health clinician who had begun treating clients living with trauma’s aftereffects long before “trauma” became a buzzword. And yet, she and her sons were not given trauma-informed care as they witnessed his drowning in a rip current in the Wisconsin River during a family vacation.
The first responders were not the only ones to fail the Rodriguez family: the churches and clergy Jen initially turned to for help were even less equipped to meet her and her sons where they were. Foolish attempts to “pray away” the many ways trauma wreaked havoc on their bodies and minds did more harm than good.
And yet Jen was determined to find her way back to a healthy and happy life, even while struggling to help her boys do the same. Thankfully, she had two things to cling to: Tony’s clinical library and a spark of faith that somehow managed to keep flickering in the darkness. From Tony’s books, she learned how to find the right kind of clinical care—and the right clinicians. And she wrestled with God daily by writing in her journals, which led to her first book—A Time to Mourn & A Time to Dance. I have often thanked Jennifer for the way her memoir left a trail of breadcrumbs for the rest of us to follow as we make our way through the aftermath of life’s traumas.
But I found myself asking just how exactly did she do it? How did she find healing, wholeness, and happiness again after such a tremendous loss? How did the combination of the right clinical care and the right spiritual care lift her out of the depths of despair?
Jen answered these questions by writing another book—Gathering Stars: Reflections, Practices, and Prayers in Trauma Recovery, released by Wildhouse Publishing October 6, 2026. This time she leaves her readers with much more than breadcrumbs. She has prepared a generous buffet of honest reflections, clinically-proven somatic practices, and heartfelt prayers from which to choose as readers make their own way forward from the traumas of their lives.
Gathering Stars guides the reader through the darkest of nights without any false promises or platitudes. Its message is clear: healing from trauma is not easy, but with both clinical and spiritual help, it is possible.
As she and I worked together to select a wide range of options from Jen’s wealth of experience with somatic practice, I noticed that some practices were easy to describe in words, while others were more three-dimensional and became confusing when we tried to flatten them out onto the page. The last thing trauma survivors need is more confusion, so we enlisted a wonderful filmmaker to create videos of Jen visually demonstrating the more complicated practices. Readers just point their smart phones at QR codes embedded in the book and click, and the author steps off the page via video and gently guides them on the road to trauma recovery.
Trauma is real. And so is trauma recovery. If you’re part of the 70% of American adults who have experienced a traumatic life event, or if you are one of the 13 million who develop PTSD each year, Gathering Stars may be a good traveling companion for you, wherever you are on the road to healing.
You can purchase a copy of Gathering Stars: Reflections, Practices, and Prayers in Trauma Recovery from Wildhouse Publishing here: https://wildhousepublishing.com/gathering-stars-reflections-practices-and-prayers-in-trauma-recovery/
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