Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

“The Mother’s Voice” by Kathy Weingarten

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Subtitle: Strengthening Intimacy in Families

I read this by coincidence, and it fits perfectly with themes I’ve been thinking about lately. Kathy Weingarten, a family therapist, addresses double binds that society creates for women around acceptable roles and definitions of success. She talks about dominating behaviors in men and how to address them. She weaves her personal story of motherhood, illness, and family together with societal trends. Throughout, she maintains awareness of intersectional issues of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she realized that her need to focus on her health conflicted directly with her need to be a “good mother” by focusing wholly on her pre-adolescent children. This contrast brought to light the invisible constraints society placed on her thoughts about mothering. She includes thoughts about the roles of wives and fathers as well.

At age 7, her son bullied her daughter, then 3 years old. She withdrew from his dominating behavior, and had to consciously reconnect with him. As she connects with him as “like her” rather than disconnecting as “alien, unlike her,” she has leverage to change the roles society prescribes for boys, sons, and men, as well as for mothers.

When she shares her true feelings and thoughts with her children in age-appropriate ways rather than maintaining a perfectly serene front, she builds real connections with them and allows them to see her as a separate person.

I appreciate how much consciousness and intention Weingarten brings to her mothering.

Some passages become repetitive, perhaps in an attempt to convince the reader, but that is a minor flaw. Overall, this is a beautifully written, carefully thought out, intimate gift of a book. Highly recommended.

Available at biblio.com

“I Thought We’d Never Speak Again” by Laura Davis

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Subtitle: The Road from Estrangement to Reconciliation

Recommended to me by: Laura Davis’s website

Laura Davis is co-author of the classic book about healing from incest, “The Courage to Heal.”

This book is written with compassionate awareness that not all stories have happy endings and not all estrangements can be reconciled. Nevertheless, I cried while reading it, for all the estrangements I have been unable to reconcile, and for all the reconciliations that turned out to be grave mistakes, and for all the fears that I should have been able to do it all better.

It has concrete suggestions for how to evaluate the possibility of reconciliation and take steps toward it, as well as a variety of gritty, beautiful stories about others’ attempts and successes. Davis’ reconciliation with her mother is woven through the book.

Recommended, if you have the time and energy to work through the feelings it might bring up.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Street Without a Name” by Kapka Kassabova

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Subtitle: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria

Recommended to me by: Ceil Wirth on the EEFC mailing list

Kapka Kassabova’s chilling, yet engaging, personal memoir of growing up in communist Bulgaria, and then returning to visit shortly after Bulgaria joined the European Union. The characters are finely drawn, and each chapter covers a different aspect (home, school, summers) in overlapping chronologies. The childhood section focuses primarily on Sofia, the capital, and the adult section covers all the regions of Bulgaria, shading into travelogue more than memoir. Woven around personal details, she covers history, current events, communism, capitalism, and ever-present tensions and truces between different ethnicities (Bulgarians, Turks, Macedonians, Greeks).

Her family emigrated to New Zealand when Kassabova was 18, and the book was written in English and published in the US, with the occasional New Zealand turn of phrase.

Kassabova is a few years younger than I am. While she was growing up with her sister and parents in a 2-room (not 2 bedrooms, 2 rooms total) apartment, struggling for food and boots and sometimes electricity and water, I was growing up with relative plenty, vaguely aware but mostly oblivious of others’ struggles.

Coincidentally we also visited Bulgaria at around the same time in 2007, although I only went to Sofia and Bansko. We visited many of the same attractions in those places, and I appreciated learning more details about them. For example, I drank from the mineral spring in the center of Sofia, but didn’t know that it flooded the main street when they first accidentally dug into it.

My attention wandered occasionally while reading, but overall I recommend this book highly as a memoir and a source of information about Bulgaria then and now.

Available at bookshop.org.

“In an Unspoken Voice” by Peter A. Levine, PhD

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Subtitle: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness

This book is billed as a “culmination of his life’s work” on the back cover. It recapitulates material from Peter Levine’s earlier book “Waking the Tiger” about trauma and the nervous system, and uses many of the same case studies covered in the Somatic Experiencing curriculum. Somatic Experiencing is Levine’s protocol for healing trauma, taught through the Foundation for Human Enrichment.

I liked his emphasis on the need for therapists to be present, flexible, and cooperative, rather than distant, rigid, and controlling. I liked his quote from an (unidentified) soldier returned from Iraq: “I have a Post-Traumatic Stress Injury, not Disorder.”

I liked his distinction between awareness and introspection: awareness is experiencing the inner glow of an ember, while introspection is examining it with an external flashlight. Awareness allows; introspection dissects. He also distinguishes between feelings (bodily sensations), and emotions (fear, anger, etc.) which arise when impulses are interrupted.

There are some annoying aspects to the book, starting with overuse of italics for emphasis. When discussing the history of scientific discoveries about trauma, emotions, and the nervous system, he repeatedly uses the words “prescience” or “prescient” regarding earlier researchers, even though they clearly did actual science. When talking about the calming effect of being near a peaceful person, he names three specific famous men and the generic “loving mother peacefully nursing her infant.”

This book would make a good textbook for Somatic Experiencing classes (aside from the annoying bits). It is too dense for a layperson to enjoy, and yet doesn’t cover the healing process in enough detail to be a technical reference on its own.

Available at bookshop.org.

“CrowHeart” by Keelin Anderson

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Subtitle: becoming unwounded, a memoir of transformation

Recommended to me 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 Amazon.

“We are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy” by Maurice Sendak

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I’m a lifetime fan of Maurice Sendak. I still have my childhood copy of “Where the Wild Things Are.” I bought “We are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy” when it came out in 1993, but I hadn’t looked at it in years. I pulled it off the shelf today and read it twice, puzzling.

Two obscure nursery rhymes are tied together to form a loose structure for the story told in pictures. Children of varied skin colors, including white Jack and Guy, live in a shantytown of cardboard boxes. Adult-size rats steal their kittens and a brown-skinned toddler. The moon intervenes as a huge cat, rescuing the kittens and baby, which Jack and Guy adopt.

The kids wrap themselves in newspapers which have clearly legible headlines about real estate prices and consumerism in one illustration, and layoffs and homelessness in another. Even though this book was published almost 20 years ago, it is painfully apt today.

From this link I learned that Maurice Sendak’s parents were Jews who emigrated from Poland, and that he is gay. From this link I learned that the Wild Things are based on the relatives who visited when he was a child.

This book evokes relief because it does not pretend everything is okay, even as it introduces hope and rescue. At the same time, the disjointed, allusive story leaves me puzzled, unsettled.

Edited to add: A recent interview with Maurice Sendak.

Available at bookshop.org.