Subtitle: And Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors

This is an anthology of fairy tales retold for adults, with the scary bits left in, and also the bits about resilience and survival. Yes, her father cut off her arms, but then the armless maiden rescues herself and her child through quick wits as well as magic.

The stories vary [...]]]>

Subtitle: And Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors

This is an anthology of fairy tales retold for adults, with the scary bits left in, and also the bits about resilience and survival. Yes, her father cut off her arms, but then the armless maiden rescues herself and her child through quick wits as well as magic.

The stories vary widely from beautifully retold tales, to heart-wrenching realities, to clunky pieces using child abuse for cheap drama. I imagine each reader would put different stories in the three categories.

Some of my favorites are:

• “The Session” by Steven Gould, where an adult Sleeping Beauty has a therapy session about who, exactly, gave her that poisoned apple.
• “Knives” by Munro Sickafoose, where a girl is isolated in a tower by her beloved father, and has to learn about the outside world after he dies.
• Terri Windling’s “The Green Children” about a young girl whose mother killed her abuser, and Terri Windling’s essay about her real mother, who didn’t.
• “The Little Dirty Girl” by Joanna Russ rings true about what’s needed for healing.

This is a book to read slowly, with time for emotional processing, and plenty of permission to skip the stories that don’t resonate for you, or that resonate too much.

Available at Powell’s Books.

Recommended by: Keelin Anderson

To tell her story of healing from incest and emotional abuse, Keelin Anderson weaves together daily narrative, fiction, quotes, tarot readings, and dreams, all in present tense.

As I read, I saw places where our paths have overlapped, and places where they have diverged. We have both struggled [...]]]>
CROWHEART: becoming unwounded, a memoir of transformation

Recommended by: Keelin Anderson

To tell her story of healing from incest and emotional abuse, Keelin Anderson weaves together daily narrative, fiction, quotes, tarot readings, and dreams, all in present tense.

As I read, I saw places where our paths have overlapped, and places where they have diverged. We have both struggled with finding respectful healers to help us, and have vowed to be respectful of our own clients and their individual processes.

She consciously decides to invite spirit guides into her process. I did that for a while, but found that not all spirit guides are trustworthy, and I was better off looking within for guidance. I think there are many ways of contacting Spirit and healing.

Available from Lulu.

Subtitle: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

Recommended by: Reading Martha Beck’s older books

I first read this years ago and loved it. I came back to it while writing a (forthcoming) article about spiritual abuse and faith. Since I last read it, I read her newer book “Steering by Starlight” and saw [...]]]>

Subtitle: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

Recommended by: Reading Martha Beck’s older books

I first read this years ago and loved it. I came back to it while writing a (forthcoming) article about spiritual abuse and faith. Since I last read it, I read her newer book “Steering by Starlight” and saw that her latest book is about weight-loss, so I started re-reading with trepidation. I still like this one, though!

This book is honest about extreme sexual and spiritual abuse and its effects, side by side with humorous details about daily life. She talks about forgiveness without preaching (much). She talks about how crazymaking it is to have someone casually deny reality. She talks about how wrenching it is to lose family connections because she tells the truth.

She also talks about her personal search for faith, first as the seeking camel, then as the discerning lion, then as the innocent, playful child.

In her last act as a practicing Mormon, she spoke to a huge crowd about domestic violence. “If something I said feels right to you, believe it. If it feels wrong, disbelieve it. The choice to believe or disbelieve, that’s what makes you free.”

Available at Powell’s Books.

Recommended by: rushthatspeaks

This is Margaux Fragoso’s matter-of-fact memoir of growing up in Union City, New Jersey with an angry father who is a jeweler, a mentally ill mother who is often hospitalized, and a very complicated relationship with a pedophile, Peter.

I skipped whole chapters in the middle of this book, unable to read the detailed, oily [...]]]>

Recommended by: rushthatspeaks

This is Margaux Fragoso’s matter-of-fact memoir of growing up in Union City, New Jersey with an angry father who is a jeweler, a mentally ill mother who is often hospitalized, and a very complicated relationship with a pedophile, Peter.

I skipped whole chapters in the middle of this book, unable to read the detailed, oily dishonesty that twists a child’s desire to be pleasing and pleasant against herself, eventually manipulating her into holding still for rape.

Over the fourteen years that Margaux Fragoso was enmeshed with Peter, she continued to express her spirit and her boundaries as well. The story of her entrapment is also the story of how she survived and eventually flourished.

In the afterword, she notes, “that a sexual predator looks for children from troubled homes like mine, but that he can also trick average families into thinking he’s ordinary of even an upstanding member of the community.” If you have been the victim of such a predator’s deceit, this book is immensely validating.

Highly recommended for detailed, clear depictions of complex relationships, with a huge trigger warning for manipulation and sexual abuse.

Available at Powell’s Books.

Recommended by: Dr. Kathleen Young

This is an academic book, written in precise psychological language, containing enough material for a semester course. Startlingly compassionate insights into complex trauma and prolonged childhood abuse (abbreviated PCA) are built into a treatment model that focuses on the family context [...]]]>
Subtitle: Therapy for Child Abuse Survivors in Family and Social Context

Recommended by: Dr. Kathleen Young

This is an academic book, written in precise psychological language, containing enough material for a semester course. Startlingly compassionate insights into complex trauma and prolonged childhood abuse (abbreviated PCA) are built into a treatment model that focuses on the family context rather than individual traumatic events. It is evidence-based, building the case for its treatment model with a thorough survey of existing research. This is a profoundly respectful book, well worth the effort of reading it.

Part 1
The first section distinguishes prolonged childhood abuse from single-incident adult trauma. An abused child in an “ineffective family” is focused on survival and misses out on learning skills for effective living, as well as missing the love needed to thrive.

A quote from a research paper:

“Some of the most painful stories I have heard – from survivors of even the most brutal and unremitting sexual abuse in childhood, as well as people who have had the good luck not to have been subjected to this kind of horror as children – had to do with other ways in which they were not heard, seen, respected, or loved….children who lived in a home that looked OK, with parents who seemed OK and had a life that appeared fine and even privileged, but who never felt special, never felt cherished, never in their whole lives ran in the door knowing someone was waiting there who thought they were the most wonderful precious child in the world.” [Rivera, 1996]

“People who grow up abused, neglected, disregarded and abandoned as children are as adults at extreme risk for continued invalidation and mistreatment by society at large.” This is not only because of individual missing skills, but because of a cascade of consequences making people more vulnerable to revictimization.

“Paradoxically, our society’s emphasis on self-reliance, coupled with the propagation of inequities based on gender, ethnic background, financial status, and other social classifications, converge to restrict the access of already deprived and maltreated individuals to resources that would help them attain effective self-sufficient functioning.”

“The overriding objective of this form of treatment is teaching clients adaptive living skills for moderating distress and enhancing daily functioning.”

Part 2
The second section describes forming a collaborative therapeutic alliance and is full of insights I haven’t seen elsewhere. People who were extensively abused as children expect disdain and abandonment. Many survivors interpret questions as commands, and comply with the therapist’s implicit expectations of them to avoid conflict. There is both intense longing for connection and extreme guardedness born of painful experience.

“What these clients need is to be treated not as helpless children, but as adults who by surviving extraordinarily adverse circumstances, have already demonstrated the potential to endure the stresses and challenges of daily living. [...] Recognition, acceptance, and validation of survivors’ feelings, experiences, and longings is a helpful and essential aspect of treatment.”

“[R]emember that actions speak louder than words, and that subtle, guileless, spontaneous responses that implicitly communicate respect and regard for the personhood of the client speak the loudest of all.”

“[E]xploration of experience of child abuse in PCA survivors is most likely to be productive when it occurs under the initiation, direction, and guidance of the client. This material is highly charged, and strongly associated with a sense of helplessness and being controlled. It is usually best to leave it up to the client to determine whether and when to acknowledge and address it.”

The distinction is made between helping someone recover from a traumatic event and reconnect with existing skills and resources, and helping someone recover from a traumatic childhood where those skills and resources were never acquired, and need to be learned as an adult.

Part 3
The third part gives prioritized goals for the treatment process and strategies for how to achieve them. The collaborative therapeutic alliance is still the highest priority.

The first goal is the ability to manage and modulate distress. Anxiety-reduction methods are introduced, and a practice schedule is set up so that the client can practice the skills when they’re not immediately necessary. One technique is inviting the client to remember or create a safe place, and return there in imagination to reduce stress. Activity routines to interrupt depression are also proposed.

Dissociation is also addressed. Disconnection from the present moment is distinguished from internal fragmentation.

This goal is focused on adaptive functioning, rather than on exploring or reducing dissociation for its own sake. Grounding techniques are covered to anchor the client in the here-and-now.

While it is known that extreme trauma leads to dissociation, it may be that lack of attunement with family members may predispose a child to dissociation. “In this type of interpersonal context, where the attributions and appraisals of a child made by the people closest to her or him vary wildly, more or less independently of the behavior displayed, it is easy to imagine that the experience and perception of self would be similarly confused, mercurial, and disjointed.”

“[T]his approach encourages the practitioner to recognize the importance of being able to maintain a cohesive perception of the survivor despite the client’s own subjective experience of being fractured.” For the client, internal cooperation rather than integration is the goal.

The next goal is learning to exercise critical thinking and judgment. The capricious abusive environment may not have taught reasoning skills, and the survivor learns negative and detrimental beliefs, supported by adverse experiences.

“Familial relationships characterized by neglect and emotional detachment, domination, and criticism, and erratic and unpredictable behavior powerfully instill convictions in the survivor that she or he is unworthy and inept, and that others are malicious and unreliable.”

“Just as the unassertiveness and emotional dependency engendered by the family context renders a child more susceptible to abuse, the exacerbation of these characteristics by explicit abuse magnifies survivors’ risk of being abandoned, taken advantage of, and re-victimized.”

“The survivor ends up being blamed for what is actually the failure of the family and society to adequately equip her or him with the resources required for effective functioning as an adult. It is as if someone has tied the laces of child’s two shoes together, and then, when she or he inevitably trips and falls, berates her or him for being clumsy.”

It’s a good thing I don’t highlight books, or this one would glow yellow on every page. I wish every practitioner working with traumatized people would read and absorb this book. I would love to take a seminar from Steven Gold!

About the author.

Recommended by: a client.

Geneen Roth has written several books about overcoming compulsive eating by removing external rules around food and listening to one’s own body instead. She also talks about the source of compulsive eating – not an internal lack of control, but a survival strategy to overcome the lack of external control in childhood.

In [...]]]>

Recommended by: a client.

Geneen Roth has written several books about overcoming compulsive eating by removing external rules around food and listening to one’s own body instead. She also talks about the source of compulsive eating – not an internal lack of control, but a survival strategy to overcome the lack of external control in childhood.

In this book, she talks about her own history with intimacy, and the connections between how we treat food, and how we treat emotional connections in our lives. She reveals the neglect and emotional and physical abuse of her childhood, and shares stories from her “Breaking Free” workshops as well.

If you deeply explore one area of life, you will find the answers to every area. What you learn as you break free from your obsession with food is what you need to learn about intimacy:

Commit yourself.
Tell the truth.
Trust yourself.
Pain ends and so does everything else.
Laugh easily.
Cry easily.
Have patience.
Be willing to be vulnerable.
When you notice that you are clinging to anything and it’s causing trouble, drop it.
Be willing to fail.
Don’t let fear stop you from leaping into the unknown, or from sitting in dark silence.
Remember that everything gets lost, stolen, ruined, worn out, or broken; bodies sag and wrinkle; everyone suffers; and everyone dies.
No act of love is ever wasted.

The book is full of vivid metaphors and urgent truths. It is a call to turn inside, face one’s demons with gentleness and compassion, and find freedom.

Available at Powell’s Books.

Recommended by: Tess Alfonsin

A hard-edged book for teens that takes on multiple tough issues:

While I applaud the author’s courage in addressing all these important issues, I think the book would have [...]]]>

Recommended by: Tess Alfonsin

A hard-edged book for teens that takes on multiple tough issues:

• Children’s cruelty to each other for being fat or disfigured
• What it’s like to grow up fat or disfigured
• Surviving parental abuse and abandonment
• Abortion
• Hypocrisy
• Religious intolerance by some Christians

While I applaud the author’s courage in addressing all these important issues, I think the book would have been stronger with at least one fewer sub-plot and more attention to characterization. The major teen characters showed some complexity, but the adults were either all-good or all-bad.

I was caught up in the plot and characters until the book suddenly turned into a thriller with a violent climax. I felt tricked into reading something far more violent than I expected or enjoyed.

I’m glad teens are reading and thinking about all the issues in this book.  I wish the issues weren’t packaged with a violent, all-good/all-bad wrapper.

Available at Powell’s Books.

A mix of personal memoir, client stories, and self-help advice, this book compassionately details the effects of having a narcissistic mother and shows a pathway for healing.

Narcissism – extreme self-absorbtion and inability to empathize with others – occurs on a spectrum from a few narcissistic traits to full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Women with these traits [...]]]>

A mix of personal memoir, client stories, and self-help advice, this book compassionately details the effects of having a narcissistic mother and shows a pathway for healing.

Narcissism – extreme self-absorbtion and inability to empathize with others – occurs on a spectrum from a few narcissistic traits to full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Women with these traits compete with, control, or ignore their children rather than providing unconditional mirroring and acceptance.

Their children grow up questioning their very right to existence, either piling up achievements to become “good enough”, or hiding from their pain in drugs, alcohol, and acting out.

“A daughter who doesn’t receive validation from her earliest relationship with her mother learns that she has no significance in the world and her efforts have no effect. She tries her hardest to make a genuine connection with Mom, but fails, and thinks that the problem of rarely being able to please her mother lies within herself. This teaches the daugther that she is unworthy of love.”

McBride gives three steps for recovery:

1. Understanding and diagnosing the problem
2. Processing the grief and other feelings from childhood
3. Discovering true preferences, values, and ways of being.

I recommend this calm, thorough, and encouraging book to anyone who finds herself struggling to prove that she is good enough to be seen, honored, and valued.

Available at Powell’s Books.

With warmth and care, Muller describes some of the outcomes of an abusive childhood, or “family of sorrow,” and some spiritual tools that can bring healing.

Near the beginning of the book, he proposes an exercise that resonated deeply with me. (Emphasis added.)

[F]or a single day: Resolve to go [...]]]> Recommended by: Emma McCreary

With warmth and care, Muller describes some of the outcomes of an abusive childhood, or “family of sorrow,” and some spiritual tools that can bring healing.

Near the beginning of the book, he proposes an exercise that resonated deeply with me. (Emphasis added.)

[F]or a single day: Resolve to go through an entire day assuming that you are trustworthy, that all your feelings are accurate, that all your perceptions and intuitions are reliable. As you approach each person or situation, ask yourself the questions, If I knew that I was absolutely trustworthy, how would I handle this moment? What would I do? What could I say that would be true? What would be the right action to settle this situation with safety and clarity?

I wish this exercise had been proposed to me by every healer I’ve seen. I wish everyone in confusion, doubt, and pain could be encouraged to try this, and begin to find their center again.

He takes spiritual insights from Christianity, Judaism, Sufism, Buddhism, and other faiths. As an ordained minister, he is clearly most familiar with Christianity, awkwardly referring to Jews as “Hebrews.”

Each chapter covers a different effect of a difficult childhood, including Pain and Foregiveness, Fear and Faith, Grandiosity and Humility, etc. Some chapters spoke to me more than others, despite his assumption that everyone would have all the issues he mentions.

He can also be prescriptive in some of his exercises, for example suggesting that one speak the words of forgiveness whether one feels them or not. While forgiveness can be powerfully healing, I believe that it cannot be rushed, and forcing the process only prolongs the pain.

Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who is struggling with creating meaning from a painful childhood. As the quote above recommends, keep a careful eye on what resonates for you, and skip over what does not. Different chapters may speak to you at different times.

Available at Powell’s Books.

22 year old Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s articulate, harrowing memoir of her childhood in the Florida foster care system.

I read it in one sitting, pausing to cry in a few places. The three little words aren’t what you think. She has a journalist’s eye for detail and a poet’s eye for intensity, conveying a child’s [...]]]>

22 year old Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s articulate, harrowing memoir of her childhood in the Florida foster care system.

I read it in one sitting, pausing to cry in a few places. The three little words aren’t what you think. She has a journalist’s eye for detail and a poet’s eye for intensity, conveying a child’s confusion without confusing the reader.

I learned about the Florida foster care system, about the power of caseworkers and and the mercy of Guardians ad litem, about both loving and abusive foster parents, and about one child’s path of survival through it all. Through Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s story, I connected with my own childhood longing for rescue and warmth, although I grew up in an “intact” family.

Available at Powell’s Books.