Journey to Alternity: Transformational Healing Through Stories and Metaphors

Judith Simon Prager, PhD, is on the faculty in the UCLA Ext. Writers’ Program and together with her husband, Harry Youtt, with whom she teaches, was named Outstanding Instructor of 2004. She has trained physicians, nurses, fire fighters, EMTs and other first responders across the United States and in England and China in Verbal First Aid™, the protocol from several of the books she co-authored.

The Worst Is Over: What To Say When Every Moment Counts introduced the protocol and was named “the ‘bible’ for crisis communications” by The International Journal of Emergency Mental Health.

The new parenting book is called Verbal First Aid: Help Your Kids Heal From Fear and Pain–and Come Out Strong, and it has garnered much praise from pediatricians from the US, Australia, England, and China. With this protocol, you can help turn a hurt into a healing, a scare into a comfort, even a potential trauma into a memory of courage.

Her latest book is a children’s book, Owie-Cadabra’s Verbal First Aid: A Somewhat Magical Way To Help Heal Yourself And Your Friends. When children learn this wonderful language for themselves, they have the gift of self-healing and the voice in their heads at moments of crisis, big and small, becomes calm, wise, and sets a course for recovery.

She has given keynote addresses at many conferences including the Association of Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health and Reinventing Medicine, with Larry Dossey, and her consciousness-raising book, Journey to Alternity: Transformational Healing Through Stories and Metaphors provides the science, the healings, and the exercises that invite readers to experience profound new ways to see themselves and the world.

In her checkered past, Judith has been a novelist, a columnist for an Australian magazine, has written “General Hospital” for ABC-TV, and was Vice President, Creative Director of Ogilvy & Mather Promotions in New York. She was also Dean of the School of Transformational Psychology at the University of Philosophical Research.

Today she has a private practice in trauma and hypnosis in Los Angeles. It’s a busy, full life and for all of that, she is grateful.