Gentling

I grew up during the strange and turbulent 1960s and 70s in Erie, Pennsylvania. Though we were not dirt poor, my childhood family experience did not include the privileges and extravagances that I saw in the wider world. My three sisters and I were wealthy in perhaps a more important way: we had two spiritual, gentle, and firm parents in our home that was filled with love and care for each other.
My education, life experience, and vocational sense have always straddled the precarious space between secular and spiritual worlds. Having one foot planted in both worlds has allowed me to be in a unique place to meld the technical aspects of therapy with spiritual sensibilities like gentleness and compassion. My life journey has both gifted and burdened me with extensive experience in secular human services and spiritual ministry to adults, families, teens, and children.

This book was written with a passion to relieve the immense pain of children who have not had the idyllic and gentle upbringing that I had. My spirituality compels that when I see pain, I seek to heal it. If others who have similar callings read my work, perhaps more children will be healed. If others who have not yet recognized a similar calling read it, perhaps it will awaken in them at least a new awareness of the need for greater attention to these inured children.

When I begin to feel the pain of the work a bit too sharply, I try hard to be gentle with myself, and turn to my garden, or my watercolors, or to the deep woods to refresh myself. Anne, the love of my life for over thirty years, and my two fine sons, Andy and Tyler, continue to support me in my many ventures.

Each completion of a vocational task conceives and births the next... my curiosity about how to help a sexually abused child to heal their sexuality while they are still a child has grown from a passing thought in the midst of writing Gentling to my current

Breakthrough Treatment Offers New Hope for Recovery


Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition with 3 new chapters on adolescents

Gentling represents a new paradigm in the therapeutic approach to children who have
experienced physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and have acquired Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder as a result. This text redefines PTSD in child abuse survivors by identifying
child-specific behavioral signs commonly seen, and offers a means to individualize
treatment and measure therapeutic outcomes through understanding each suffering
child's unique symptom profile. The practical and easily understood Gentling approaches
and techniques can be easily learned by clinicians, parents, foster parents, teachers and
all other care givers of these children to effect real and lasting healing. With this book,
you will:
Learn child-specific signs of PTSD in abused children
Learn how to manage the often intense reactivity seen in stress episodes
Gain the practical, gentle, and effective treatment tools that really help these children
Use the Child Stress Profile (CSP) to guide treatment and measure outcomes
Deploy handy 'Quick Teach Sheets' that can be copied and handed to foster parents,
teachers, and social workers


Clinicians Acclaim for Gentling


"In this world where children are often disenfranchised in trauma care--and all too
often treated with the same techniques as adults--Krill makes a compelling case for how
to adapt proven post-trauma treatment to the world of a child."

--Michele Rosenthal, HealMyPTSD.com


"Congratulations to Krill when he says that 'being gentle' cannot be over-emphasized
in work with the abused."
--Andrew D. Gibson, PhD
Author of Got an Angry Kid? Parenting Spike, A Seriously Difficult Child


"William Krill's book is greatly needed. PTSD is the most common aftermath of child
abuse and often domestic abuse as well. There is a critical scarcity of mental-health professionals
who know how to recognize child abuse, let alone treat it."

--Fr. Heyward B. Ewart, III, Ph.D., St. James the Elder Theological Seminary,
author of AM I BAD? Recovering From Abusew



Cover photo by W.A. Krill/ Fighting Chance Photography



Learn more at Gentling.org



From the New Horizons in Therapy Series at Loving Healing Press LovingHealing.com

Available in hardcover, trade paper, and eBook editions


FAM001010 Family & Relationships : Abuse - Child Abuse

PSY022040 Psychology : Psychopathology - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

FAM004000 Family & Relationships : Adoption & Fostering