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From the author of the New York Times bestseller, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, comes the guided journal, with self-reflective writing practices to help you heal from the past, set intentions for healthier relationships, and reconnect with your true self. If you grew up with an emotionally immature, unavailable, or selfish parent, you may recall your childhood as a time when your emotional needs were not met or dismissed—and you may have lingering feelings of anger, loneliness, betrayal, and abandonment as a result. As an adult, you have likely fought hard to establish your own sense of self, and heal the invisible wounds caused by your parent. Now, let this compassionate journal guide you even further on your journey toward self-development and personal growth. Based on Lindsay Gibson's self-help hit, the Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents Guided Journal offers soothing, self-reflective writing practices to help you process your emotions, heal the invisible wounds of growing up with an emotionally immature parent (EIP), and set intentions for building healthier and more reciprocal relationships now and in the future. With this empowering journal, you'll explore how your relationships and overall well-being have been negatively impacted by EIPs, grow beyond these negative effects to live a more expansive life, and cultivate a deeper connection with your true self. The simple act of putting pen to paper affirms the importance of your thoughts and feelings. When you write about your inner experiences—your thoughts, feelings, and wishes—you connect emotionally with yourself. Journaling can be an encounter with your soul—your own spark of absolute individuality. The reflective practices in this journal will help you forge a more authentic connection to your spark—who you really are. Written by renowned mental health and wellness experts, New Harbinger's Journals for Change combine evidence-based psychology with proven-effective guided journaling techniques to help you make lasting personal change—one page at a time.

Instant New York Times BestsellerFrom the bestselling author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, a road map for understanding and moving past family struggles—and living your life, your way. Every family has a story. For some of us, our family of origin is a solid foundation that feeds our confidence and helps us navigate life's challenges. For others, it's a source of pain, hurt, and conflict that can feel like a lifelong burden. In this empowering guide, licensed therapist and bestselling relationship expert Nedra Glover Tawwab offers clear advice for identifying dysfunctional family patterns and choosing the best path to breaking the cycle and moving forward. Covering topics ranging from the trauma of emotional neglect, to the legacy of addicted or absent parents, to mental health struggles in siblings and other relatives, and more, this clear and compassionate guide will help you take control of your own life—and honor the person you truly are.

In 1957, when Amy Turner was four years old, her father had to be talked down from a hotel ledge by a priest. The story of his attempted suicide received nationwide press coverage, and he spent months in a psychiatric facility before returning home. From then on, Amy constantly worried about him for reasons she didn't yet fully understand, triggering a pattern of hypervigilance that would plague her into adulthood.In 2010, fifty-five years after her father's attempted suicide, Amy—now a wife, mother, and lawyer-turned-schoolteacher—is convinced she's dealt with all the psychological reverberations of her childhood. Then she steps into a crosswalk and is mowed down by a pickup truck—an accident that nearly kills her, and that ultimately propels her on a remarkable emotional journey. With the help of acupuncture, somatic-oriented therapies, and serendipities that might be attributed to grace, Amy first unravels the trauma of her own brush with death and then, unexpectedly, heals the childhood trauma buried far deeper.Poignant and intimate, On the Ledge is Amy's insightful and surprisingly humorous chronicle of coming to terms with herself and her parents as the distinct, vulnerable individuals they are. Perhaps more meaningfully, it offers proof that no matter how far along you are in life, it's never too late to find yourself.

A raw, often wry, memoir of mothers, mysteries, and miracles. Surrendered at birth in a closed adoption, Candi Byrne's biology and ethnicity is a secret. The impending arrival of her first grandchild ignites an urgency to identify potential genetic time bombs and confirm her ancestry. Due to arcane privacy laws, Candi is repeatedly denied access to the one person who could provide that information—her biological mother. After years of failed attempts, she resigns herself to never learning the truth about her roots; that is, until her ninety-year-old Aunt Delores has a vision and insists Candi resume efforts to find her birth family. Candi is gobsmacked when an internet search she's performed thousands of times before suddenly reveals her birth mother's identity. Within hours, she ends up on the doorstep of her birth mother—a place she's sworn never to visit. After a series of guilt-driven interactions with “Those People,” as she refers to her maternal birth family, Candi terminates contact. Although the reunion proves disastrous, it opens her eyes to truths about her relationship with her adoptive mother, Delphine. Though their relationship was difficult and contentious during Delphine's life, a series of miraculous experiences after her death guides Candi home to herself—where, she learns, she has belonged all along.

In 1977, Jeanne's German nationalist ex-husband, Klaus, tells her he's gotten a new job and wants to take their three-year-old daughter and six-year-old son away for a long weekend to celebrate. Jeanne relents. But Klaus never returns and instead sends Jeanne a letter, delivered by a mutual friend, in which he declares that he has fled to Germany and she will never see him, or her children, again.The next four months are filled with agony, despair, and anger as Jeanne seeks legal support but quickly learns that federal parental kidnapping laws will offer her little help. She reflects on her tumultuous ten-year marriage to Klaus and the unsettling events that followed their divorce. A product of the patriarchal culture of the 1950s, Jeanne's nice-girl mentality is being tested and reshaped by the feminist movement of the 1970s, and she finds that the kidnapping ultimately becomes a doorway to unexpected strength.You'll Never Find Us is the story of a young mother coming into her own power, regardless of past mistakes, bad judgment, and fears; the story of a woman who realizes she must tap into her newfound resilience and courage to find her stolen children—and steal them back.

Broken relationships between adult children and their parents is a widespread phenomenon. While the parent-child attachment relationship is of critical importance for the child in the early years of life, the parent-child relationship continues to be a source of great importance over the course of the individual's life span for both the child and the parent. For adults and adult children who are estranged/alienated from each other, the pain and dissatisfaction never fully go away. Despite the prevalence of the problem of ruptured relationships, there are few resources available for mental health professionals working with this population. This book provides a tool for clinicians to turn to when they are working with adult children and their parents seeking to resolve conflict, improve communication, and enhance their relationships.

A mother recounts her journey with her son through his trials of addiction and his long road to recovery in a memoir full of honesty, humor, and hope. The Weight of a Feather chronicles the relationship between a mother and her son from his journey into the dark world of addiction to his final recovery years later. In this raw and candid memoir, Lynda Hacker Araoz is ruthlessly honest about the deception, betrayal, and violence inherent in the world of addiction, as well as the many pitfalls one encounters on the pathway to recovery. However, she balances out the weight of her family's struggles with lighter moments of connection with her son and the absurdities they encounter. Above all, The Weight of a Feather is a testimony to the enduring strength of family love. It brings comfort and hope to others who are going through a similar ordeal and provides insight for those who wonder why recovery can be so elusive. Lynda urges readers to take a fresh look at the world of addiction, calling for a new model for treatment in light of the opioid epidemic impacting families across the country.

Linda I. Meyers was twenty-eight and the mother of three little boys when her mother, after a lifetime of threats, killed herself. Staggered by conflicting feelings of relief and remorse, Linda believed that the best way to give meaning to her mother's death was to make changes to her own life. Bolstered by the women's movement of the seventies, she left her marriage, went to college, started a successful family acting business, and established a fulfilling career. Written with irony and humor and sprinkled with Yiddish, The Tell is one woman's inspirational story of before and after, and ultimately of emancipation and purpose.

A new and revised edition of Claudia Black's groundbreaking workbook for adult children from dysfunctional families This updated edition of Dr. Black's revolutionary self-help workbook provides readers with a step-by-step framework and a guide that takes them through a process to recognize how present challenges are influenced by growing up in a troubled family system, release the parts of the past they wish to leave behind, and take greater responsibility for how they live today.Adult children tend to repeat the life scripts of their challenged, troubled families as a result of internalized beliefs and behaviors that were either modeled for them or were a part of their survival strategy. Claudia Black, world-renowned expert on dysfunctional families, articulates a seven-step process for readers to heal the wounds of their past.This is also an excellent resource to aid therapists, counselors, and other helping professionals in their work with clients to help them become aware of how their family system affected them and grow beyond it.

Ever since she was a child, Linda Joy Myers felt the power of the past. As the third daughter in her family to be abandoned or estranged by a mother, she observed the consequences of that heritage on the women she loved as well as herself. But thanks to the stories told to her by her great-grandmother, Myers received a gift that proved crucial in her life: the idea that everyone is a walking storybook, and that we all have within us the key to a deeper understanding of life—the secret stories that make themselves known even without words. Song of the Plains is a weaving of family history that starts in the Oklahoma plains and spans over forty years as Myers combs through dusty archives, family stories, and genealogy online. She discovers the secrets that help to explain the fractures in her family, and the ways in which her mother and grandmother found a way not only to survive the great challenges of their eras, but to thrive despite mental illness and abuse. She discovers how decisions made long ago broke her family apart—and she makes it her life's work to change her family story from one of abuse and loss to one of finding and creating a new story of hope, forgiveness, healing, and love.

We all have an imaginary definition of a great family. We imagine what it would be like to belong to such a family. No fights over the holidays. No getting on one another's nerves. Respect for individual identity. Mutual support, without being intrusive. So many people believe they are disqualified from having a better family experience, primarily because they compare their own family with the mythic ideal, and their reality falls short. Is that a fair standard to judge against?” In the pages of Why Do I Love These People?, Po Bronson takes us on an extraordinary journey. It begins on a river in Texas, where a mother gets trapped underwater and has to bargain for her own life and that of her kids. Then, a father and his daughter return to their tiny rice-growing village in China, hoping to rekindle their love for each other inside the walls of his childhood home. Next, a son puts forth a riddle, asking us to understand what his first experience of God has to do with his Mexican American mother.Every step–and every family–on this journey is real. Calling upon his gift for powerful nonfiction narrative and philosophical insight, Bronson explores the incredibly complicated feelings that we have for our families. Each chapter introduces us to two people–a father and his son, a daughter and her mother, a wife and her husband–and we come to know them as intimately as characters in a novel, following the story of their relationship as they struggle resiliently through the kinds of hardships all families endure. Some of the people manage to save their relationship, while others find a better life only after letting the relationship go. From their efforts, the wisdom in this book emerges. We are left feeling emotionally raw but grounded–and better prepared to love, through both hard times and good time.In these twenty mesmerizing stories, we discover what is essential and elemental to all families and, in doing so, slowly abolish the fantasies and fictions we have about those we fight to stay connected to.In Why Do I Love These People?, Bronson shows us that we are united by our yearnings and aspirations: Family is not our dividing line, but our common ground.

Family conflict has traditionally been studied by researchers who are at a safe intellectual distance from the families under their study. In Skeletons in the Closet, and in line with feminist research methodologies, the hierarchical distance between researcher and subject is broken down. All of the contributors to this volume are academics, and all are closely related to the families they write about. Skeletons in the Closet consists of ten essays about unresolved or unresolvable family conflicts. The contributors start from the assumption that families—whether legal-marriage families, common-law marriage families, single-parent families, multiple-generation families, same-sex partnerships, or adoptive families—are cradles of intense emotion. That intensity, they argue, may translate into conflict, competition, domination, abuse, exploitation, or even hate. This book explores those areas most likely to grip family members in unresolved interpersonal strife, as well as the strategies people use to solve the issues and the shame and isolation that conflict brings in societies that normatively expect family life to be one of joy, mutual sharing, and caring. This first-hand narration of family conflict by social scholars has much to contribute to sociological studies of the family, both methodologically and theoretically. The introduction and conclusion place family conflict within sociological and social psychological theories and methods.

Family therapist, parenting expert, and author of Wonderful Ways to Love a Child shares insight and advice on developing strong family relationships.It's a never-ending journey that is certainly rewarding in the end. Wonderful Ways to Be a Family gives you Ford's tried and true approach to what it means to be a family. Inspirational messages coupled with expert advice creates the ultimate parenting guide.From raising kids to marriage, it isn't a smooth task, yet Ford's accessible and friendly style offers practical suggestions and helpful advice for every situation imaginable. Gain support and knowledge with:Real-life examples of how to handle conflictInspirational stories filled with encouraging messages and lessonsProfessional advice on a variety of scenariosWhether you're a new parent or a veteran, Wonderful Ways to Be a Family offers a combination of professional and practical guidance that any parent can apply to their family dynamic.Featuring a foreword by Susan Isaacs Kohl, author of The Best Things Parents Do

Dr. Joshua Coleman is a caring psychologist who nonetheless isn't afraid to tell the truth: not all marriages can be joyful at all times, but that isn't a cause for divorce, especially with children involved.Even if your marriage is never going to be the one you dreamed of, you can still live happily ever after. Dr. Coleman provides wise and compassionate advice on becoming a happy person in an unhappy situation.In this groundbreaking work, Dr. Coleman also teaches readers how to:- Reduce out-of-control conflict in the home- Let go of the fairy-tale marriage ideal and create a better reality- Accept change in your partner and make peace with what you can't change- Maintain domestic harmony in times of crisisUnhappy husbands and wives finally have an alternative to the devastation of divorce. And by maintaining imperfect harmony, each parent has the opportunity to love, to care for, and to teach his or her children'full-time.'

It is estimated that as many as 34 million people grew up in alcoholic homes. But what about the rest of us? What about families that had no alcoholism, but did have perfectionism, workaholism, compulsive overeating, intimacy problems, depression, problems in expressing feelings, plus all the other personality traits that can produce a family system much like an alcoholic one? Countless millions of us struggle with these kinds of dysfunctions every day, and until very recently we struggled alone. Pulling together both theory and clinical practice, John and Linda Friel provide a readable explanation of what happened to us and how we can rectify it.