survival story

“A Safe Place for Pearl” by Ani Rose Whaleswan

April 27, 2018 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Ani Rose Whaleswan. I’ve known the author for a long time online, and I contributed an essay to her collection We Have Come Far.

“A Safe Place for Pearl” is a gentle offering of artwork, dreams, and narration, full of hope and inner resources. When there is no human support available, Nature and Spirit step in to support a child going through hard times. (The hard times are not described.) The remembering adult is supported as well. This book powerfully answers the question, “How did you survive? What helped you through?”

Recommended as support for looking inside and trusting what supports you, even if it is not visible to others.

Available at Amazon.

“The Night Child” by Anna Quinn

February 12, 2018 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: Katherine Macomber Millman

A powerful, heartbreaking book about a woman slowly remembering and coming to terms with the childhood abuse she endured.

It reminded me of Susan Palwick’s “Flying In Place” in the way her pain is visible to the people around her, and she receives a lot of skilled, kind help. For many people, the process is less visible and they receive less assistance.

Anna Quinn has skillfully fictionalized her memoir, with lots of present-time sensory details to balance the horror of remembered abuse. The focus is on recovery, not the abuse itself.

Highly recommended if you want to read about an emotionally intense healing process which clearly shows the lasting harm done by abuse and the hard work it takes to recover.

Anna Quinn’s blog post When Your Memoir Wants To Be A Novel

Available at bookshop.org.

“8” by Amy Fusselman

August 8, 2017 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: a client

This is a book about healing, rather than a book about trauma.

Amy Fusselman layers incidents with “her pedophile” among meditations about the nature of time, parenting, relationships, healing, bodywork, therapy, New York City cab rides, and writing in a coffee shop when celebrities walk by. She loops among the topics gracefully, like the figure skater she was as a girl.

Recommended for one person’s perspective on the effects of childhood sexual abuse, putting it in its (admittedly important) place among the rest of the events in a life. Recommended for touching on the topic of abuse forthrightly, and then going on to something else, rather than sinking into it more and more deeply. This is how healing works.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Death Without Denial Grief Without Apology” by Barbara K. Roberts

March 18, 2017 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: A Guide for Facing Death and Loss

This is a loving clear-eyed unflinchingly personal look at terminal illness, death, and grief by Oregon’s former governor Barbara Roberts. Her husband Frank Roberts died of cancer during her governorship. From the introduction:

I hope for a culture of loving openness in every medical office, hospital room, health care clinic, and emergency room where news of life’s limitations and death’s impending arrival are discussed openly and compassionately. People who are dying and their families and loved ones must be prepared to create such a culture for themselves.

Frank was a state senator during his last year, and there are some mentions of both of their political work in their choice to keep his terminal illness private for some time. I can only imagine the strength it took to continue to govern through illness and grief.

She tells the story of his diagnosis, their decision process together, their choice of hospice rather than further treatment, his quiet death, and her grief afterward. Emotions are included, but the story is calmly told. She shares the practical steps of planning for death. She talks openly about her own and others’ private rituals of grief, such as bringing flowers to a recently dead wife on an anniversary, or talking to the urn containing Frank’s ashes.

Highly recommended!

Wikipedia page about Oregon Democratic governor Barbara Roberts. Her term was from 1991-1995. She was the first woman Oregon governor. The second was just elected in 2016, our current governor Kate Brown.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Flying in Place” by Susan Palwick

February 17, 2015 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

A twelve-year-old girl is being abused by her father, and is ultimately rescued by their next door neighbors. Her older sister had died, and at the end of the book, the neighbor says, “No one can help her. That’s what being dead means.”

Susan Palwick’s blog title is Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good. That does describe this book’s satisfying rescue, and at the same time, the book realistically portrays gaslighting and abuse and the necessary mechanisms for survival.

I’ve had the book long enough that I don’t remember how I first came across it. I went back to it looking for that quote. Highly recommended, if you don’t mind crying at the end.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Waking” by Matthew Sanford

June 15, 2013 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: A memoir of trauma and transcendence

Matt was paralyzed from the chest down at the age of 13 in a winter car crash that also killed his father and older sister. His book chronicles the numbness and dissociation that help him survive his first months and years of recovery, and his later reconnection with his body. The book includes the beautifully functional family relationships that helped sustain him.

The doctors tell him he cannot connect with his legs past his spinal injury. Even though the flesh is connected, with blood circulating in and out of the paralyzed areas, they tell him the energy he senses is just in his imagination, denial, wishful thinking.

He remembers his father doing yoga alone in the basement long before it became popularly accepted in the US. He finds a yoga teacher, Jo Zukovich, with the intuition and imagination to work with him and begins reconnecting with his body. Along the way he experiences the flashbacks and body memories of healing trauma.

He and Jo discover that “alignment and precision increase mind-body integration regardless of paralysis.” Matt writes,

“If I listen inwardly to my whole experience (both my mind’s and my body’s), my mind can feel into my legs. […] It is simply a matter of learning to listen to a different level of presence, to realizing that the silence within my paralysis is not loss. In fact, it is both awake and alive. […] The silence that helped me leave my body and protected me from pain in intensive care is the same silence that helps me energetically connect mind and body.”

Highly recommended for a clear, honest look at trauma, recovery, and living well with disabilities. Prepare to have your unconscious stereotypes about “poor, wheelchair-bound” paraplegics decisively shattered.

Available at bookshop.org.