Creating Sanctuary makes some broadly challenging statements about human nature and social organization. Dr. Sandra Bloom interweaves the individual and the social, the personal and the political, with the story of how she and a group of friends and colleagues created a traditional psychiatric milieu based on social psychiatry principles. Bloom and her colleagues have come to believe that unresolved, multi-generational, often forgotten trauma leads to a compulsion to repeat that is a powerful force in individual and social history. Because of this unresolved legacy of trauma, all of our social systems are trauma-organized, producing institutions which are unresponsive to and often directly counter to human needs.

Creating Sanctuary presents the thesis that effective social reconstruction is only effective if we understand the biological, psychological, social, and moral legacy of trauma.