Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

relationship

“Surviving Domestic Violence” by Elaine Weiss

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Subtitle: Voices of Women Who Broke Free
Recommended to me by: Finding it in a Little Free Library

A compassionate and thorough look at how women get ensnared into abusive relationships with men, and how they get themselves out. Elaine Weiss includes her own story. She clarifies repeatedly that the abuse is not the victim/survivor’s fault, and there is no “type” of woman that is more vulnerable. Any woman can get into a relationship with an abusive person, and that’s what creates an abusive relationship.

The book was published in 2000, which only partially excuses its heterosexual and gendered lens. Yes, many abusive relationships are men abusing women. And some are not. This book could have also addressed queer relationships and women abusers in at least one of its examples.

The stories are also strongly biased toward the women finding loving marriages after leaving the abusive relationships. This supports the point that it’s not the women’s fault, but also pushes the narrative that a positive relationship is the ultimate goal and measure of success in healing.

It took me a long time to start reading the book after picking it up. And I did skim a couple of the stories where I didn’t want to read about the verbal abuse the woman was enduring. The bewildered teen looking around to see if anyone will tell her the abuse is wrong and not her fault breaks my heart. But I’m glad I did finally read the book. It is a great resource for people who carry stereotypes about who gets abused and why, both as bystanders and as people who have been abused themselves.

Available via Biblio.com.

“If the Buddha Married” by Charlotte Kasl, Ph.D.

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Subtitle: Creating Enduring Relationships on a Spiritual Path
Recommended to me by: Seeing it in a Little Free Library and liking If the Buddha Dated

I chose Love as my word for this year, so this book feels appropriate to pick up. I tried reading “How to Love” by Thich Nhat Hanh earlier, and got bogged down in the prescriptiveness and assumptions about gender roles, so I put it down halfway through. This book doesn’t have those problems, although all the couples appear to be heterosexual until one at the very end of the book.

Charlotte Karl writes with clarity, depth, and kindness. When I was getting toward the end of the book, I thought, “Surely that’s the end of the substantive material,” but there were several more important topics, all treated with the same thoughtfulness as the rest of the book – sexuality, monogamy, honesty, and affairs.

Other topics include working through tension and resistance, recognizing masks, keeping agreements with great care, living in an “us” place (rather than me vs. you), open communication, and offering appreciation. It also includes some of the things that get in the way of authentic relationships, such as reacting out of unprocessed trauma from a young self, projecting feelings onto the other person, taking the partner for granted, and trying to change them into someone else.

The book is grounded in Zen Buddhism, and tries to be inclusive of other religions, such as the Quakers. There is a clunker of a moment where Charlotte Karl refers to the Jewish philosophy of repentance and repair in connection with Rosh Hashanah (new year) instead of Yom Kippur (day of atonement). Where was her editor?! She summarizes in a few paragraphs what Danya Ruttenberg explores in depth in her book “On Repentance and Repair.” (I read half of that recently, but it was more academic than I wanted, and focused at the national rather than the personal level.)

It’s good to read stories of couples who are kind, committed, and most of all, successful at building happy lives together while being their authentic selves. I have wanted a relationship like that for a long time. I had more or less decided that what I want is a mirage. Now I’m reminded that maybe it is possible, although I still don’t know a path to bring it into my life.

Highly recommended if you also care about the how and why of authentic relationships.

Available at bookshop.org.

“You Just Don’t Understand” by Deborah Tannen, Ph.D.

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Subtitle: Women and Men in Conversation

Recommended to me by: a friend

My friend was telling me about a gathering where one person had a knee injury. All the women who stopped to chat with the injured person asked how she was doing and how she had gotten injured. All the men talked about their own knee injuries or other injuries they had experienced. My friend said the men were trying to save the injured person’s pride and equalize status by saying they had gotten injured too. I sputtered that that was a very generous interpretation, but I didn’t necessarily agree. She recommended this book.

The book was published in 1990, and it shows. There is an updated edition from 2007, but I got the older edition from the library.

Tannen’s thesis is that women talk to support intimacy, and men talk to compete for status. The first half of the book has many examples, without ever mentioning sexism or cultural influences, not to mention non-binary people. Men protect their independence at the same time as women are trying to build connection, causing discord in heterosexual relationships.

Just about when I was going to stop reading in frustration, Tannen says that Italian preschoolers of any gender debate heatedly with each other, because that is what Italian culture teaches and expects. She also talks about New York Jewish culture, where both women and men are more direct and outspoken, and less direct people interpret that as being rude and pushy.

Then she talks about sexism, where men who are direct and authoritative are interpreted as being powerful and appropriately masculine, whereas women are seen as overstepping their bounds and being arrogant or aggressive. She talks about how the press talked about Geraldine Ferraro in disparagingly gendered terms “but they didn’t mean to.” I wonder if she wanted to retract that generous interpretation after seeing how the press treated Hillary Clinton.

At the very end, she says that she is not advocating for anyone to change their style, but to keep in mind these differences and be open to believing in people’s good intentions. Like any less-dominant group, I think women already understand the status-oriented style quite well, and men need to pick up the slack by learning to work better with a collaborative style.

The book does have a few nods toward Not All Men, and Not All Women. It mentions gay and lesbian relationships once that I noticed. It has a terribly racist description of communication styles in a Mayan community in Mexico that I can only hope is improved in the 2007 edition.

My friend did a great job of summarizing the primary takeaway of the book (women talk for connection, men talk for status). It’s a useful thing to listen for.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Ask for Horses” by Tina Tau

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Subtitle: Memoir of a Dream-Guided Life

Recommended to me by: The author is a friend

This book is both honest and kind. It looks directly at hard times and painful emotions, and maintains enough buoyancy and narrative flow to carry the reader forward without getting mired in pain. It holds the tension between personal autonomy and spiritual direction inclusively, without needing to choose one or the other. It looks tenderly at mistakes and stuck places, holding compassion for younger selves that were doing the best they could.

The included dreams are brief, powerful, mysterious. They are interpreted with gentle curiosity, an eye toward word play, and a willingness to explore new paths. “Dreams tell you something you don’t already know.” There are no fixed interpretations of dream symbols, and the dreamer is always in charge. Other people helping with a dream say, “If this were my dream,” offering rather than imposing interpretations.

The book pulled me through it, and I felt accompanied in some of my own life struggles. Recommended!

Available at Kelson Books and bookshop.org.

“Crucial Conversations Third Edition” by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan

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Subtitle: Tools For Talking When Stakes Are High

Recommended to me by: my boss

I read this book back in 2013 and decided to reread it when my boss mentioned it.

In addition to my summary in 2013, I noticed more about questioning inner stories. When we assign roles like Villain, Victim, and Helpless One, we close off avenues to potential solutions. When we can see everyone in a situation as a complex human with a mix of skills, past experiences, and motivations, we can see openings for solutions more clearly.

I wrote about a similar approach in 2018 in Offer a Collaborative Story.

Crucial Conversations has an oversimplified approach to emotions. The claim is that emotions are caused by our stories, and we have to change stories to change or quiet our emotions. While it is true that a negative story can escalate negative emotions, overall our emotions are signals about our inner truth. It is a mark of privilege to expect everyone to be calm in a difficult situation. Telling people they are causing a problem by having the “wrong story” can quickly shade into gaslighting.

The book has an extended example where a woman is silenced and talked over by a man in a business context. The message of the example is that we have to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and ask them for what we need without regard to privilege, sexism, and institutional power. We all exist in a sexist, racist, capitalist system, and people who act out those biases are not inherently evil. At the same time, putting responsibility on a less privileged individual to manage the situation without mentioning the systemic issues in play is oversimplified and imbalanced. The authors could have mentioned that the situation is stacked against the less privileged person, and that if their techniques don’t work, it doesn’t mean she did them wrong or didn’t try hard enough.

The book contains a lot of ableist and judgmental language. “Dumb” and other slurs are used liberally. Some behaviors are ascribed to “the worst at dialogue” (italics theirs) without noticing that they are failing at their own command to be generous and ascribe positive motives.

This is a recently published third edition. While it contains some useful ideas, I cannot recommend it wholeheartedly because of the shortcomings that have not been addressed.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Being In My Body” by Toni Rahman

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Subtitle: What you Might Not Have Known about Trauma, Dissociation and the Brain

Recommended to me by: a client

This book covers a lot of ground, and does it well. Toni Rahman summarizes current research into developmental trauma, CPTSD, dissociation, emotions, attachment, and polyvagal theory, as well as sharing some of her own story and client stories. She applies this material to parenting, inhabiting the body, and healthy adult intimacy.

Some of the many ideas in the book:

  • We are designed, from birth, to take refuge in the trusting bonds we have with others.
  • What children need from their caring adults is flexibility and openness balanced with a strong enough sense of self and one’s own limits, with curiosity about who this child is.
  • Regression is leaving the present moment and reliving the past instead. This can also be called an emotional flashback.
  • Feeling an emotion is acknowledging it, allowing it to be in the body. Emoting is acting it out: yelling, crying, etc.
  • Via Karla McLaren, event trauma happens not just from something difficult or overwhelming, but from not being welcomed back into the tribe afterward. A full initiation includes both surviving challenging circumstances, and being received with adequate attention, empathy, and care afterwards.
  • For an infant or small child, chronic or prolonged parental misattunement without adequate repair represents a traumatic threat to life.
  • Feeling threatened by a parent who is also a source of care is a problem in itself, compounded by not having support to express or resolve the problem. This is disorganized attachment.
  • For someone with unhealed disorganized attachment or CPTSD, intimacy is triggering and terrifying rather than soothing and nurturing.
  • How your body responds to intimacy is an echo of your early experiences.
  • We can approach our own bodies with care to build secure attachment and intimacy with ourselves.
  • You will know what you like because just thinking of it will make you feel soft, relaxed, and light, not restricted, guarded, or confused.

There are a couple of distracting textual errors in the book: duplicated client quotes, and at least one misspelling of a place name.

Overall, highly recommended for anyone interested in trauma, inhabiting the body, and healthy intimacy.

Toni Rahman’s website.

Available at bookshop.org.