I've always been a big reader, though the world of COVID has moved me more toward fiction than nonfiction because of the stress release it offers. I've also started listening to audiobooks while I sew, and that helped me polish off 67 books last year. I read in a variety of areas, but I especially enjoy fantasy, murder/mystery, and historical fiction. These are some of my favorite books from 2022. Trying to name my favorite of the year is impossible, but if you want the books I've recommended to the most people, they are Matrix, Hacienda, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, The Vanishing Half, The Gilded Ones, Honor, The Last Karankawas, and The Hero of This Book. So most of them. :) 

Murder/Mystery:
Before She Was Found by Heather Gudenkauf
Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson
The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James (This also ventures into supernatural.)
​The Overnight Guest by Heather Gudenkauf
A Madness of Sunshine by Nalini Singh
The Maid by Nita Prose 
The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas (This is also supernatural and historical fiction.)

Fantasy:
The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean (feminist topics)
The Gilded Ones and its sequel The Merciless Ones by Namina Forna 
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
The primary four books of The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater

Historical Fiction:
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson (but not so much its sequel)
Matrix by Lauren Groff 
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab (This also is supernatural.)
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Romance:
Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon 

Memoir:
Somebody's Daughter by Ashley Ford 

Fiction:
The Last Karankawas by Kimberly Garza 
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken 
Honor by by Thrity Umrigar 

©2023 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Wow.

Just wow.

By the time I was 50% of the way through The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed, I was in complete awe of this amazing book. While billed as a young adult book that focuses on a group of high school girls, there is still much in the book for adults as we all are facing a society that is finally recognizing how large of a problem sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and rape are in our culture. 

The Nowhere Girls starts with the beginning of the school year as Grace, a liberal minister's daughter who is new to town becomes friends with Rosina, a Hispanic lesbian outsider at the high school, and Erin who has Asperger's disease and a hidden history others at the school know nothing about. Grace has moved into the home of Lucy, a girl who was raped by three boys from the high school last year. Unfortunately, Lucy was not believed by the community and was shunned by her peers. Her family left town in disgrace.

Now Grace wants to find justice for Lucy. As she learns about the rape, Grace convinces Rosina and Erin to help her form "the Nowhere Girls," a group devoted to bringing about change around the rape culture in their small town. While there are great doubts among the girls as to whether the group will do any good, slowly but surely its numbers and its effectiveness grow. Soon the establishment of the town is fighting back, forcing the principal to suspend any members involved in the Nowhere Girls for daring to accuse the boys of the town of inappropriate behavior.

Midway through the book, a group of 31 girls clandestinely meet and have an incredible discussion. Among the topics they broach are virginity, sexuality, pleasure, and what they owe boys. The girls begin to realize that they don't owe boys or men anything in terms of sex. They have a right to make choices about their own bodies. They realize they need to start supporting each other regardless of whether they are virgins or sexually active. They speak out against the slut shaming that happens in our culture wherein boys can be sexually promiscuous but girls are not allowed to be. As I read this discussion, I began wishing that The Nowhere Girls was mandatory reading for all high schoolers, though I can see the religious right screaming in terror at such radical ideas being promoted to impressionable youth.
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Mixed in with the primary themes of rape and sexual activity are also discussions of what it means to be accepting of others. Current topics that are part of the national discourse such as community activism, immigration issues, racial issues and transgender acceptance are all part of the book. The Nowhere Girls was published in October 2017 just as the #MeToo movement was beginning to emerge, but the book is very much in line with all that has happened since.

Without spoiling the ending, I will say that I was left choked up in very good tears at the end of the book. Amy Reed powerfully engages readers' emotions, especially those of us who have dealt with the same fears, struggles and obstacles that her heroines face. For young people facing these same issues as they come of age, The Nowhere Girls can give hope that things are changing in our world for the better.

​©2018 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., GreenHeartGuidance.com

I received a free advance reader copy of Driven via Netgalley in return for an honest review.

When we think of heartbreak, most of us think of losing a romantic love. Yet the pain of losing a loved one to death is every bit as devastating – if not moreso—than the heartbreak of a lost romantic love. Both losses can launch us into a deep spiraling grief that consumes us, body, mind and soul. Melissa Stephenson vividly brings that raw emotional pain to her writing. The death of her brother Matthew is one of the primary storylines running through Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back. She describes the horrid experience all of us go through in the early days of a loss, waking from a sleep to remember that a loved one has died and our world is no longer what it was: “It’s a vicious cycle: the forgetting, the waking, and the fresh wave of grief and nausea that crash over me as I remember.” As her deep grief continues Stephenson describes the ensuing depression: “My life feels like roadkill, a mess beyond fixing, only my brain won’t stop thinking any more than I could talk my heart out of beating. I live because my body does, a black hole incarnate.”

These emotions are the brutal reality of what we experience when someone we love dies. Stephenson also isn’t afraid of exploring the thoughts that most of us don’t want to admit we have around death. She talks explicitly about wondering what Matthew’s life-ending wound looked like, a deeply personal thought that most would hide in fear that they would be judged “too morbid” or even worse. Yet all of us have these questions and thoughts about death even if we won’t admit that we’ve thought about them. As Stephenson reflects on her brother’s cremation, her vivid imagery shows clearly how the details surrounding his death invaded her mind:

Disclaimer: I know the author of this book from professional contacts.

I am one of the most musically un-hip people in Austin. For many reasons, I don’t take advantage of the live music scene here. While I enjoy music, I am terrible about remembering who sings what song. When I dated a very not-famous musician (because if you live in Austin, you most likely will date a musician at some point), I drove him nuts for being so musically ignorant.

Hence, when Kristin Casey mentioned to me she was writing a book about a famous rock star she dated, it didn’t really grab my attention. When she released the title of Rock Monster: My Life with Joe Walsh, I actually had to go Google to find out whom Joe Walsh is. As I read his bio, I was able to say, “Oh, The Eagles. I’ve heard of them.” But really, I’m not one who would normally pick up a book to read it because it’s about a rock star. However, I’ve really enjoyed the blog posts of Casey’s that I’ve read in the past. I knew she was a skilled writer, so I was curious to read her book. The sample she shared at her book release at BookPeople in March was tantalizing, and I was anxious to jump into reading the rest of the book.

I was not at all disappointed. As the book flap summarizes so concisely, Rock Monster is the “sexy, crazy, cautionary tale of two addicts in love without a single relationship skill.” For me, the book felt as though the masquerade ball scene from Labyrinth was taking place in the Upside Down of Stranger Things. Casey’s life with Walsh was filled with fame and luxury. She describes accompanying him on tours domestically and abroad while staying in hotels such as The Plaza. They visit places such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Switzerland. Their social lives involve contacts and friends from among the rich and famous; Casey casually mentions at one point that Lionel Richie had agreed to marry her and Walsh as though this is typical for most people when choosing the celebrant for their wedding ceremonies. Walsh gives Casey clothes from his ex-lover Stevie Nicks (who also joins them for parties) along with beautiful jewelry.

Yet despite all the opulence of the seeming fairy tale of romance and fame, there was a very dark side to the life that Casey and Walsh shared that was permeated with emotional, physical and substance abuse. At one point they were living in a penthouse, but there were few usable areas in the space due to Walsh’s clutter and mess. That outward physical disorder symbolically represented the rest of their relationship as well as Casey struggled to find her place in Walsh’s life despite being soulmates. They shared a kinky sex life, but one that met his needs more than hers. Casey painfully discovers that she is not and will not be Walsh’s creative muse. Often left on the sidelines waiting for him to beckon her, Casey loses her connection to herself in favor of following Walsh in his world. Emotionally, he is often neglectful, subjecting her to long periods of abusive silence.  Alternating with the neglect were periods of violent verbal rage where he abusively berated Casey in front of others. Add in a few physical fights, and the lack of relationship skills between them are very clear.

And then there are the drugs. Lots of drugs. Drugs in amounts that I didn’t think were possible to use and survive. As the relationship continues, their drug use escalates and begins to destroy Casey. At one point while on tour together, Ringo Starr offers to pay for Casey to enter rehab, a gift she declines because like so many with addiction issues, she wasn’t ready to admit she had a drug problem. Despite knowing that Casey is alive and well today, I read with trepidation as the book progressed because I knew rock bottom was coming, and I was worried about how bad it would be for her. As with most people with severe addiction issues, her rock bottom was truly horrendous, though it happened in a way I didn’t expect.

I was truly captivated by Casey’s story: I had to force myself to put the Rock Monster down and go to bed on two nights before finally finishing it on the third night. As with many well-written memoirs, the prose pulls the reader into the world of the author leaving them wanting more. I even woke up one night on two separate occasions having been dreaming about what I had read before bed!

At her book release, Casey stated that she thinks she has at least two more books in her. I hope that one of those books will be more details about her tale of healing, of working through the emotional abuse of her childhood that predisposed her to addiction issues and the turmoil of her life with Walsh. As she stated at the release, “We keep saying that kids are resilient, but they just aren’t.” This underlying truth leads to the dysfunctional adult lives that so many people in our society struggle with. Learning how Casey overcame her abusive past after hitting rock bottom to become a successful woman is a tale that many can benefit from hearing.

©2018 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., GreenHeartGuidance.com

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
 
I recently read a post about recommended new releases for feminists. On that list was Queer Sex: A Trans and Non-Binary Guide to Intimacy, Pleasure and Relationships by Juno Roche. The blurb for the book sounded great, and the recommendation was incredibly enthusiastic. Although I’m a heterosexual cisgender woman and ally, I want to learn more about experiences outside of my own around sexuality and gender so I located an advance copy of the book.
 
I quickly discovered I was not really part of the target audience for Queer Sex. Roche wrote this book as a way of working through her own issues around sex after having had bottom surgery in the UK. She was struggling with dating and what sex and relationships “should” be for her, so she turned to journaling and interviewing others. Those journal entries and interviews are then compiled into an awkward volume. Roche hoped that her book would serve to help others also struggling with the same issues. This is an incredibly important goal, and one that obviously needs far more exploration.
 
However, the result is that there is often not enough basic education for readers like me who came to the book with very little knowledge about the process of transitioning or the intricacies of surgery. For example, Roche begins talking about dilation after her surgery. To me, gynecological dilation is the cervix opening for a baby to be born. Obviously, that wasn’t what she was talking about, so I had to go do some research. Likewise, Roche interviews someone who talks about chemsex. Roche herself says she doesn’t know the terms involved with chemsex, but I didn’t even know what chemsex is. These are the types of concepts that a well-written and well-edited guide book would have made clear through a few sentences or a footnote.
 
Queer Sex clearly demonstrates that there is a huge gap in the NHS in the UK for helping individuals dealing with issues around their gender and sexuality. Unfortunately, Roche doesn’t explain how the process of gender surgery happens in the UK, so those of us who live elsewhere (including me in the US) can be confused by what she discusses. To me as an outsider, it seems truly unethical that the system would provide her with the changes to align her body with her identity but then not help support her in the emotional transitions and experiences that happen as well. Of course, I realize things are probably not much better for those in the US, but it left me wondering why this gap in support exists and how it could be fixed.
 
Roche clearly struggles with low self-esteem, and this comes through very clearly in her writing. While there is a time and place for exploring low self-esteem, a “guide” to queer sex doesn’t seem to be the appropriate place for it. Roche’s lead-in to the first interview is self-disparaging, and while she means it to be humorous, the result is actually painful to read as Roche’s account of herself comes across as self-loathing. So often throughout the book I just wanted to hug Roche and tell her to believe in herself, something she clearly struggles to do. To me, it felt as though Roche really needed to be working intensely with a sex therapist rather than writing a book. Her journaling from this time could easily be edited and integrated and included in a future work once she was grounded enough in herself to write a coherent narrative.
 
Amid all the missing information and poorly integrated personal emotion is some very important and very fascinating content that should have been the focus of the book. During the transcribed interviews in the book, Roche and her interviewees explore what it means to be trans and/or non-binary. These people are trying to understand their own bodies, both pre- and post-op, their sex drives, their attractions, and their orgasms. They discuss generational differences between transwomen and what’s expected of transwomen, how trans people define themselves, and how others define them. The book explores whether genital surgery is normative and whether or not being trans is still defined by a binary system (which most agree it is). They ask questions such as “Do you have to have female genitals to be a transwoman?” These issues are the heart of the book, but because they are only discussed in the transcribed interviews, they are not fully explored.
 
Overall, Queer Sex reads like the combination of a journal and series of interviews that hasn’t been well-integrated or well-edited into a unified work. The text is repetitious in places and very self-indulgent in others. Roche’s vulnerability and exploring her experience is wonderful, but her writing needed to be edited for coherence. Her prose is absolutely gorgeous at times, such as when she discusses interviewing Kuchenga who “has a strange little triangular house, with triangular rooms, on the edge of the roundabout. As I enter her domain, I feel instantly like we are in a story full of content. And as soon as she starts to unfurl her works, I remain almost spellbound for the next two hours or so. Unfurl her words she does with a kind of languid confidence that is sonically beautiful.” However, her writing isn’t able to shine because of the poor organization and editing. Queer Sex really feels like it was only half-done and rushed to press rather than taking the time to make it into the stellar book it could have been.
 
Queer Sex contains some very important content about issues that we all should be discussing. We are all sexual (or asexual) beings, and our society’s views on sexuality and gender are changing rapidly. Even as a heterosexual cisgender woman, I recognized issues that I personally have struggled with in the dating world that Roche touches upon. I hope in her future works, Roche spends more time integrating, exploring, and editing these important topics.
 
©2018 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., GreenHeartGuidance.com

​I attract engineers. It’s just a fact of my life that I have come to accept. For 40 of my 43 years, I have lived with engineers or future engineers. I’m the daughter, ex-wife and mother of engineers. Over half of the men I have dated have been engineers. I don’t go looking for them, but yet somehow engineers find me or I find them unintentionally. When I mentioned to a friend that a man I was newly dating was an engineer, she replied, “Of course he is. What else would he be?” I suspect that it might be quicker when talking to men about their careers if I just asked them what type of engineer they are rather than inquiring them what they do for a living. Chances are that they are an engineer.

Engineers are a unique group of people with brains that function in a way that is somewhat different from many others in society. While comics like Dilbert make fun of this engineer’s mindset, I am so accustomed to it that I find men who aren’t engineers to be the ones who are different thinking. Perhaps this is why I attract engineers: I know how to be at peace with their general mindset.

Thus, when a local intimacy coach mentioned that she was reading and absolutely loving Heart in Gear: An Engineer’s Erotic Journey to Freedom by Christopher Hoffman, I immediately purchased the book. I quickly read through it, fascinated by Hoffman’s story and amazed by his deep insights and his life growth. The book was far more than I had expected or hoped for.

Like many people, Hoffman found himself in a completely unsatisfying marriage after 20 years. Having been unable to improve the relationship through counseling, Hoffman reached a crossroads. With the encouragement of friends, he left his dysfunctional marriage, began rebuilding his life and found his deepest self. Heart in Gear details how Hoffman’s life evolves professionally, psychologically, and sexually as he worked to become a happier person.

Hoffman’s journey is filled with many fun and very sexy moments that he details explicitly, but he also encounters pain along the way. As he notes, “I learned not to be afraid of big emotions. Feeling pain was just a sign that what I was encountering mattered” (146). Through exploring that pain, Hoffman finds some of the deeper truths about himself and life. One of his first steps in the journey was discovering, “There are people trying to reach us, but they can’t penetrate into our hearts—not because we aren’t listening to them, but because we aren’t listening to ourselves” (53).

Once Hoffman realizes that he has to be accountable for his own emotions, desires, and behaviors rather than depending on others to shape him, he is able to enter relationships that are more soul-empowering. Rather than trying to fix everything and everyone around him (a very male and very engineer approach to life), Hoffman discovered that the healthier approach is to accept others as they are and to appreciate them for their genuine selves. Through this full acceptance of others, Hoffman found that his sexual connection with others became far more intimate and powerful than ever before. In his words, “I unplugged my cock from my ego and plugged it into my heart” (108).

I recommend Heart in Gear for any man (but especially engineers and their partners) who is wanting to learn more about himself, to heal his wounds and to be a better romantic partner. For a short and very easy to read book, Heart in Gear is filled with some very deep and powerful insights that have the potential to open up new worlds to its readers.
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©2018 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Over a year ago, I managed to get my heart bruised, not for the first time in recent years. In fact, it felt like the 142nd time, though in reality, it hasn’t been quite that many. However, the pain of a bruised heart always seems to be magnified in the moment. As I was going through the pain of this deep hurt, I said to the other person involved that I would just add it to my long list of recent screwups. Yet the other person didn’t see me as having failed; rather, he saw me as having been brave.

For me, being called brave is a trigger to anger and frustration. It’s not much different to me than “you’re so strong,” another catchphrase that I find utterly exasperating. When people use these phrases with me, I always ask or tell them, “What other choice do I have? I can either surrender to the pain and misery of my life, or I can keep fighting.” To me, there really is no choice between those options.

As I began reading Brené Brown’s Rising Strong for a book group, her words began to help me pinpoint why I find being called brave so frustrating. She writes,

For me, the frustration comes from those who only want to see the sanitized version of my life. They aren’t interested in seeing the struggle and pain. By calling me brave, I fear that people are denying and demeaning the very real challenges I endure every single day. That fear may not be grounded in reality every time, but it's what the situations feel like to me based on past experiences.

Brown’s exploration of what it means to be brave in the face of what she calls “falls” (but what most would call failure) builds on the themes of her previous works on shame and vulnerability. It is a call for readers to live genuine lives that by definition must experience falls in order to move forward and grow.  Brown states, “To pretend that we can get to helping, generous, and brave without navigating through tough emotions like desperation, shame, and panic is a profoundly dangerous and misguided assumption.” Yet most people want life to be that easy. They want to believe that being strong and brave is uncomplicated. It's not. Strength and bravery often encompass a great deal of hidden pain.

Reading Brown’s Rising Strong helped me come to terms with what others see as brave in my behavior; before reading it, I truly didn’t understand what others were seeing in me. However, for me, this is simply how I live my life. I would rather fall flat on my face from having tried and failed than to have regrets about the things I might have done. To me, it doesn’t feel brave at all. It just feels like being me. It also feels horribly painful at times. 

For those who want to live their lives in a "braver" way, I highly recommend Brown's Rising Strong. It offers great insight about learning to face one's own stories that we tell ourselves to deceive ourselves and keep ourselves from living a more truthful life. The book details ways to be open and genuine with others. And most importantly, the book acknowledges the pain of falling flat on one's face when things don't go as planned. Brown truly understands all that it takes to live a genuine life, something few people in our society are strong enough to do.

​©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(Contains very mild spoilers.)

When I was in the seventh grade, we had summer required reading for English class. One of those books was Anne of Green Gables. It quickly became a favorite of mine, and I have reread it and its first seven sequels more times than I can count. The Anne of Green Gables mini-series (1985) with Megan Follows, Colleen Dewhurst, and Richard Farnsworth also quickly became a beloved favorite. (More recently seeing Follows play the evil Queen Mary of France in Reign was mind-blowing. She definitely was no longer the sweet little Anne she once played!)

Now, more than thirty years later, Netflix has created a new version of the Anne of Green Gables story in Anne with an E. This series makes it clear from the start that it is not going to be a remake of the previous version. Its opening credits have a very modern song, “Ahead by a Century,” sung by the Tragically Hip, one that made me wonder if this wasn’t a mistake on my part to watch the series.

However, aside from the opening song, I was incredibly pleased by the new interpretation of a perennial classic in the first few episodes. Perhaps the most stunning thing to me was the idea that Anne Shirley actually had C-PTSD. Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a result of an ongoing traumatic situation such as child abuse rather than a one-time incident such as rape or a hurricane which still can easily cause PTSD. This presentation makes great sense because it is likely that Anne would have had C-PTSD. She lived in an orphanage on-and-off throughout her child, enduring several out-placements with homes where she was treated as slave. While the book mentions her previous misery, it doesn’t dwell on it. Instead, it focuses on the happiness of Green Gables.

In this new interpretation, though, Anne is prone to spacing out in flashbacks to the terrors of her previous life. Like so many with PTSD and C-PTSD, she dissociates from her current situation when triggered by things that seem unimportant or trivial. This new version makes the hell of her previous living situations explicitly clear and might be triggering for someone who has endured similar abuse. After seeing these flashbacks, Anne’s amazing stories and vivid imagination suddenly take on new meaning when she explains, “I like imagining better than remembering.” Who can blame her when the other option is living in a mental hell of a torturous past?

Anne with an E is much darker and more painful than the book or the previous mini-series, but it’s likely far more accurate. Not only is Anne’s past pain and ongoing suffering clear, but her stressful initial relationship with Marilla Cuthbert, her adoptive mother, is not softened in any way by rose-colored glasses. Marilla clearly is from an older generation which is not great at parenting, and it is her adoptive father Matthew’s love that makes Anne’s life tolerable as she adjusts to her new situation at Green Gables.

Anne also struggles with the taunts of area children (again, triggering traumatic memories from her life at the orphanage) and their parents as they judge her for her paltry looks, unknown origins, and strange behaviors. She doesn’t feel accepted and welcomed, and after being tormented at school, Anne falls into a major depression which includes flashbacks to her tortured past when she experienced similar situations. This change, too, is more likely the road Anne would have faced rather than the rosy version in Montgomery’s original work.

The series eventually strays greatly from the book. It starts simply by containing new scenes such as Anne signing the family Bible and becoming a Cuthbert; in the book, her name was never changed from Shirley. There’s also a fire at the Gillis family home wherein Anne becomes the hero for implausible reasons; I did object to that diversionary change in the story line. By the end of the seven episodes, the characters were still the same beloved ones from Montgomery’s books, but this new, more realistic perspective on their lives had taken the storyline in a very different direction from the original source.

Even though I tend to be a purist when it comes to movie adaptations of books, I really liked the changes in Anne with an E. They brought a touch of realism to a lifelong favorite of mine, and told a story that brought the original even closer to the path I’ve traveled in life. I suspect this new interpretation may help many people come to terms with their own abusive pasts, realizing that they don’t have to be completely happy and in denial about the hell that they have survived. What they have endured was truly traumatic, and it should have impacted them just as it did for Anne with an E.

©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

​(I received a free copy of Unstrung from Netgalley in return for an honest review.)

On a whim, I previously purchased Laura Spinella’s Ghost Gifts because of its subject matter. I quickly became engrossed in a novel that embodied romance, mystery, and the metaphysical. Not only was the story of Ghost Gifts addictive to me, but Spinella’s words themselves rapidly became captivating. She is one of those authors whose prose is like poetry, flowing smoothly across the page and roping the readers in so that they stay up all night reading her work. Ghost Gifts is one of the best books I’ve read in recent years.

Upon finishing Ghost Gifts, I quickly turned to the internet and was delighted to find that Spinella had a new novel, Unstrung, about to release. As I began the story, the main character Livy (Olivia Klein) is reading and ridiculing Ghost Gifts as being a preposterous book. I love when an author (or anyone, really) can laugh at herself.

As I progressed into Unstrung, I found myself enjoying a much more intense read than I expected. I actually had to take break from reading the novel because it touched on some very deep topics that are close to my heart. The plot seemed simple and somewhat superficial at first: Livy, a first chair violinist, is having major marital problems with her second husband. Her best friend and lawyer helps her through legal troubles, and Livy is serving out community service time at a local school for students with life challenges.

However, once one gets into Unstrung, the powerful theme of loss appears as the overarching tie between the characters of the book. The theme of loss applies to so many parts of the characters’ lives: illness, death, miscarriage, money, love, adoption, abuse, addiction, tragedy, broken relationships, divorce, and dreams. As Livy and those around her struggle with these painful issues, their lives come together in unexpected ways.

As much as I loved the majority of the work and as much as it challenged me to examine issues around loss in my own life, the improbable ending was a let-down. These were not the directions I could have seen for the characters, and they were not ones that felt realistic to me. I would have chosen a very different ending had I written Unstrung. However, despite the ending, Unstrung is a fabulous novel. I look forward to reading more by Spinella.

©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Trigger Alert: This post is about sexual abuse. 

I have been sexually abused by at least three different men in this lifetime. This is unfortunately not unusual. I’ve seen statistics that suggest one in four women have been sexually abused, but I suspect the number is closer to one in two. Likewise, I’ve seen numbers ranging from one in five to one in eight men have been sexually abused. No matter what the actual statistics are, the number of victims is still way too high.

I was recently speaking with someone who has a very young daughter. He knows of my history of sexual abuse, and so as a concerned parent, he asked me how I thought we could prevent it from happening to our children. After a moment to think about it, my answer was one that I don’t like but which I think is ultimately true: We can’t. Sexual abuse is going to happen. We can do some small things to try to ward it off. We can teach our children not to abuse others in hopes of lessening rates for future generations. But like most traumas and tragedies, even with the best preparation for prevention, it will still happen.

So what can we do try to reduce the number of children who are sexually abused short of locking our children into padded cells? The biggest thing we can do is teach our children that their bodies are their own, and no one should touch their bodies without their consent. Then we need to respect what we teach them. That means ending corporal punishment. That means stopping the horrible social custom of making our children hug and kiss distant relatives and unknown adult friends whom they don’t know or care about. It means letting our children know that they are the ones who are in charge of their bodies and “no” is an appropriate response when someone wants to touch them in a way they don’t feel comfortable with.

There are books for helping talk to children about sexual abuse in ways that aren’t scary. One is called “Your Body Belongs to You” written by Cornelia Maude Spelman and illustrated by Teri Weidner. The book frames body safety in a positive manner. There are no scary strange men ready to jump out of white vans to abduct children. The problem with the book: The page that says “Some places on your body should never be touched by other people—except when you need help in the bathroom or getting dressed or when you go to the doctor.” Two of my abusers were medical doctors acting in their official capacity but greatly taking advantage of the situation. These were men I should have been able to trust, but they acted in unethical ways and violated my body. The third man who sexually abused me was a relative, one who was greatly trusted by my parents. We also need to teach our children that even those they should be able to trust will sometimes act inappropriately.

So how do we figure out whom we can trust? The biggest way is to learn how to follow your gut feelings. Listen to that voice inside you when it tells you no. That inner voice is something or someone trying to protect you. If you feel unsafe or uncomfortable with a situation, then don’t put your child into it and/or don’t put yourself into it. Furthermore, if your child tells you, “I don’t trust that person,” listen to them. Find out why your child doesn’t feel comfortable. If it’s an instinctive response, respect your child’s intuition. Children are often far more in tune with their intuition than adults because they haven’t learned to ignore it through society’s mandates. Teach your children to respect their gut feelings, too.

Another very important aspect of sexual trauma is that victims are often not believed. If your children ever tell you that someone has touched them inappropriately, believe them. Do not punish them for what has happened to them. They are children, and they did not know what was happening to them. They were unable to give consent. No older child or adult ever should be touching them inappropriately. Instead, once you have listened to their version of events, seek counseling for them and report the event to the proper authorities. Hiding sexual trauma only allows it to continue, and others will likely become victims to the same perpetrators.

One other way to help reduce sexual trauma (which is not a method all will find palpable) is through energetic work on our second chakras. I believe that many of those who are sexually abused as young children have been sexually abused in previous lives. They come into this life with already damaged second chakras, and that weakness energetically attracts those who will abuse them again. Healing any damage to our children’s second chakras and/or strengthening their second chakras will reduce sexual predators’ attraction to them. This work can be done with talented energy workers who have already healed any sexual trauma they might have endured. If they have not healed their own traumas, you don’t want to have them working on you or your children.

Sexual abuse is scary. It scars us deeply, even when it happens at a very young age. The damage it causes can become the roots for physical illness as it did in my case. Thus, it’s very important that sexual abuse of children be taken seriously so that it does not cause a lifetime of damage. Preventative education can help children stop sexual trauma from happening, but if they don’t know that what is happening is wrong, they won’t be able to stop it. Likewise, education can help victims learn to report what happened rather than living with a sense of shame that they caused the abuse to happen to them. While we can’t always prevent sexual abuse from happening, we can support victims appropriately and prevent perpetrators from acting again.

©2017 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Full Disclosure: I received a free digital copy in exchange for an honest review by NetGalley. However, I also bought a paperback copy to share with the many friends whom I’d lent my copy of How Not to Fall.

We’ve all heard the saying, “The sequel is never as good as the original.” More often than not, it’s unfortunately true. We build up our hopes for something even more amazing than the story or movie which stole our heart. Unfortunately, our fantasies are often too great, and the eventual reality is disappointing. For me, this phenomenon happened with How Not to Let Go by Emily Foster. While I adored its predecessor, How Not to Fall, I was nowhere near as enthralled with the sequel. That’s not to say that How Not to Let Go wasn’t a good book: It just wasn’t as amazing as the first in the series.

How Not to Let Go continues the story of Annabelle and Charles, two lovers who met while she was a student and he was her supervisor. After her graduation, they began a torrid one month affair, ending it when she left for medical school in Massachusetts and he stayed on at his position as a post-doctoral researcher in Indiana. In the sequel, we witness the two trying to cope with their breakup, and after a year has passed, we get to join their journey as they work toward reuniting.

The story jumps back and forth between the US and England where Charles’ family of origin lives. While attending a conference, Annabelle and Charles meet for coffee but choose not to give into sexual temptation. However, when an overly convenient plot device of potential terrorist activity leads to Charles’ brother shutting down the London airports for security reasons, the two lovers spend several days at Charles’ brother’s home having abundant sex once again. Eventually, the two both end up in Massachusetts, and they continue to work through the relationship, its issues, and their individual problems.

I struggled to figure out why this sequel wasn’t as exciting for me as the first book. The process of falling in love is a powerful and wonderful one, and that first love part of Annabelle and Charles’ relationship happened in the first book. There’s no way to recreate that initial passion and romance as a relationship continues. Reunions are hot, and the sex that follows them is also quite intense, but it’s never quite the same as the beginning of a relationship. However, the sex scenes between Annabelle and Charles were still very arousing.

The means that Foster uses to push along the plot of the novel were often a bit too over the top for me. Rich geniuses (more than one in a family!), a trust fund, a potential terrorist attack, a conveniently located gorgeous home… it all just felt less real than the first novel. The more honest parts of the novel, the ones that involved family dynamics or relationship growth, were too few and far between. While often difficult to read because of how toxic the relationships were, the family scenes were the ones that kept my attention and made me want to keep reading. Unfortunately, the great family scenes were surrounded by extensive and detailed rock climbing adventures which became tedious for me.

Foster definitely writes for sapiosexuals, readers who are turned on by intelligence. In How Not to Let Go, though, the use of imagery to describe Charles’ psychological struggles becomes burdensom. Perhaps it is the kind of language and conversation that would happen between two psychiatrists, but for most of us, we don’t create such elaborate illustrations for our personal struggles.

The hardest part for me about the book was probably not due to the author or the book itself but was due to my own life. In the novel, Charles struggles with having an avoidant attachment style due to the dysfunctional family he grew up in. He’s the kind of guy who is commitment phobic as a result of having been hurt too much in the past by those he loved. However, unlike any man I’ve ever known who has an avoidant attachment style, Charles enters intensive psychotherapy to work on healing his wounds. He regularly flies across states to continue seeing the same therapist in person. He is determined to break through the psychological struggles that hold him back from having a healthy and secure attachment to Annabelle. Perhaps I was jealous of Annabelle having found a man who was willing to do this healing work for both himself and for her, but another part of me found it very unrealistic. That left me wondering how one finds a partner who have successfully done this powerful and deep healing work, because the people who have are very rare. Thus, another part of the book felt unrealistic to me, just in a way that made me feel jealous rather than bemused.

I definitely enjoyed reading How Not to Let Go, but it was a less passionate enjoyment than I felt for its predecessor. I have already recommended How Not to Let Go to a friend with an avoidant attachment style, but I probably won’t recommend it to others whom I shared the first book with. That said, I hope Foster plans to continue writing other novels which cater to sapiosexuals, which teach healthy sexual relationships, and which portray realistic sex scenes. The world of romance definitely needs books that fit this niche!
 
© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Trigger warning: This post discusses sexual assault, rape, pedophilia and similar topics. There are no explicit depictions of any of the topics; the post is a discussion of issues around the topic of violation and consent.
 
We live in a nation where one of the major Presidential candidates has been caught on film advocating non-consensual sexual assault of women. Since this film was published in the media, many women have come forward to state that they’ve received such treatment from this candidate. Likewise, that same candidate is going to trial later in December for allegedly raping a 13 year old girl, a situation where consent can never be obtained due to the victim’s age. Despite these issues, that Presidential candidate is managing to hold a projected 40+% of the nation’s votes. What this tells us is that we live in a culture where women’s and children’s sexual rights are seen as irrelevant by far too many people.
 
Given that we live in such times, I don’t believe it is possible to discuss sexual boundaries without discussing the issue of sexual consent. In his book Sex Outside the Lines: Authentic Sexuality in a Sexually Dysfunctional Culture, Chris Donaghue attempts to do just that. The general premise of his book is that we need to break down the boundaries around sex, gender and sexuality. Donaghue doesn’t believe we should refer to ourselves as male or female, man or woman, straight or gay or even pansexual. Instead, he visualizes a utopic world where labels around sexuality are not used at all so that everyone’s sexuality is accepted.
 
As I read through beginning of the book, I kept asking myself repeatedly, “But what about consent?” By the end of the first chapter, I felt as though someone whose sexual pleasures included acting on pedophilia or rape would feel completely justified in their sexual activities and would see them as acceptable based on Donaghue’s rhetoric. By trying to break down *all* boundaries, Donaghue is doing just that: He’s getting rid of the good along with the bad. I believe that there are some very important boundaries which exist to protect us from trauma, violence, and abuse, and I believe those protective boundaries cannot ever be eliminated if our society is to become more sex positive as Donaghue hopes.
 
As I kept reading through Sex Outside the Lines, the word consent did not appear anywhere. I even stopped to look in the index to see if the word was there. It wasn’t. Finally, on page 166, Donaghue finally mentions consent in passing. He states, “As long as sex is consensual and no one is injured, then it’s all part of healthy sexual expression.” This statement, in an expanded form, needed to be at the very beginning of his book. To me, as a woman who has experienced sexual abuse and assault both as a child and as an adult, consent is an issue that cannot be ignored when discussing sexual boundaries. I wasn’t looking for an entire chapter or an entire section on consent. Instead, all I wanted was a paragraph early in the book devoted to the importance of consent as a boundary that can never be violated.
 
As my book group discussed this work, I hypothesized that Donaghue may not have had any peer readers of drafts who had endured sex abuse. Someone in the group who knows Donaghue told me that she knew for a fact that he did. Yet even under that kind of advice before publication, Donaghue still chose not to include any vital discussion of consent early in the book.
 
This issue of consent came up during Chris Donaghue’s presentation for the Southwest Sexual Health Alliance on October 8, 2016 in Austin. The SWSHA has a saying, “Don’t yuck somebody’s yum,” a phrase that was invoked before Donaghue’s presentation. In short, it means having respect for all sexual practices. What may disgust you may be the most arousing activity for someone else. We all should have respect for that difference between us. At one point, though, a therapist politely but obviously concerned asked Donaghue, “I don’t mean to yuck anybody’s yum. But what about pedophiles? What about the issue of consent?”
 
Donaghue stated that his easy-out answer is that he follows the law and advises others to do the same. He also said that healthy sex starts with compassion, and that this is the approach to work on boundaries with the clients. Donaghue noted that all of us have desires we’d never act upon, a true statement. He voiced his opinion that most people with pedophile desires know that such desires aren’t appropriate to act upon and are trying to refrain from engaging in them. I think that belief of his may be based on the population that he works with: Those who are actively working to stop from acting on non-consensual desires. I don’t believe that statement is actually true for all who violate consent, though. However, I’m viewing it from the place of a practitioner who helps those who have been violated, so my viewpoint is vastly different from his. An estimated 1 in 4 women has been sexually abused (though I believe that number is inaccurate), and an estimated 1 in 6 men (again, a number I believe is too low) have been sexually abused. Even if they are underestimates, those statistics indicate a lot of people who aren’t resisting their non-consensual urges and are harming others. Overall, the answer Donaghue gave in response to such important questions felt very unsatisfactory to me.
 
Additionally, Donaghue pounced on the therapist’s use of the word “pedophiles.” He doesn’t like the word because he believes it is a word laden with shame. He prefers to use the phrase “intergenerational sexual attraction.” On one hand, I see his point. I don’t believe in using shame the way our culture does as a disciplinary method. I’m a huge fan of Brené Brown whose work attempts to undo the damage of shame in our culture. I believe all people are capable of change though I also believe many are unwilling to do the work that is required to change and grow.
 
However, I also believe in calling a spade a spade. I’ve been in a sexual relationship with a man who is 14.5 years older than me. That is an intergenerational sexual relationship that included a lot of intergenerational sexual attraction. It was a wonderful experience for me. I’ve also been sexually abused by men who were 20-40+ years older than me when I was 3, 7 and 18 years old. Those were not intergenerational sexual relationships. Those were abuse, assault, and nonconsensual relations. They are vastly different experiences. By conflating attraction of two consenting adults to the same thing as a person attracted to and acting on pedophilia, Donaghue is helping support our culture that disregards sexual assault as a serious issue that isn’t being addressed properly. By Donaghue's logic, the term rapist should be changed to “a persuasive sexual practitioner.” However, it’s never ok to downgrade the severity of sexual abuse and assault. Language is powerful, and by rejecting language that actually names a toxic act, Donaghue is rejecting the pain and suffering of so many people whose bodies, spirits and minds have been violated.
 
I agree with Donaghue that our culture desperately needs to evolve to become a sex positive culture. In order to create that new openness towards sexuality, we must establish respect as one of the most important roots of sex positivity. We must have respect for others’ desires, for others’ bodies, and for others’ genetic predispositions, and for others’ choices. We must have respect for everything sexual about a person. Yet in order to achieve that broader respect, one must also have respect for the boundaries that are necessary to keep each person safe. Consent is a boundary that cannot ever be eliminated in a healthy sex positive culture. As we move toward a new paradigm for sexuality and gender in our lives, we must bring consent into that new culture. We need to create a world that respects everyone, especially each person’s right to say no.
 
© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Love is where compassion prevails and kindness rules. ~my tea bag’s inspirational message this morning

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the Southwest Sexual Health Alliance’s presentation of Chris Donaghue, Ph.D., who lectured on concepts from his book Sex Outside the Lines: Authentic Sexuality in a Sexually Dysfunctional Culture and an upcoming book. While I have yet to put up a book review of Sex Outside the Lines, the short version of my opinion of it is that I both loved it and hated it. It’s a work that asks readers to stretch their minds and ideas, sometimes outside the realm of reality and into a utopic society.
 
One of the things that Donaghue is very good about acknowledging is his own privilege: He knows he is a good looking, intelligent, well-educated, white male. He also recognized during the talk that he’s been recently alerted to the thin privilege he experiences. While I think his awareness of the privilege of being a fit and attractive person is a good start, I feel several of his more popular ideas continue to play directly into the overwhelming prejudice in our society against those who are not thin.

My own experience in the dating world as an obese woman is one which very much demonstrates the attitudes and prejudices in our society towards those of larger size. In the four years since I opened myself up to dating again after my separation and divorce, I’ve had very little success through either Meetups or numerous dating websites. My experience is not unique; almost every overweight person I’ve met who has tried online dating has given up because of the discrimination they faced. I can immediately name you a handful of friends and acquaintances who haven’t been on a date in years because they are seen as undateable by most of the population because of their weight. It’s not due to a lack of openness or effort on their parts.

Despite their desires that I not do it, I often call people on the difference between preference and prejudice. One of the most common things I see on dating profiles is men stating, “I don’t date fat women. I know that sounds rude, but it’s just a preference of mine.” The reality is that it’s a prejudice, not a preference. When we judge others before we even interact with them solely based on their appearances, we are discriminating. I ask people who say or write these words to replace them with a racial minority. Would they say, “I don’t date black women. I know that sounds rude, but it’s just a preference of mine”? The reality is that most of the people I interact with are aware enough to understand that to say such a thing would be incredibly rude and prejudiced. However, to them, it’s ok to have that same prejudice against those who are overweight and excuse it as “just a preference.” To say that you are not attracted to all fat people is blatant discrimination against an entire population of people without knowing them as individuals. It’s judgmental, uncompassionate, and unloving.

While Donaghue laudably argues that people should expand their boundaries and date outside of their comfort zones, he simultaneously argues both in his book and at the presentation yesterday that people should date those whom they are attracted to. Unfortunately, to most men (and probably to most people, though I don’t have the experience outside of my heterosexual experiences to verify that) that translates into being immediately attracted to others’ physical appearance. In her fabulous senior thesis Can She Really 'Play that Game Too'?, Leah Fessler describes the dating experience at Middlebury College in 2015 with a focus on the difference between men and women when it came to the “hook up culture.” One of her assertions is that a majority of men refuse to consider being with a woman if she is not immediately physically attractive to them:

I suspect a wider study of American society would find a similar pattern.   

My own experience has confirmed Fessler’s theory and expanded upon it. When I first got on dating sites, I put up professional quality pictures. When I messaged men, 95% of them did not respond. However, in my most recent round of online dating, I put up a profile with no picture; I noted at the bottom that if men had read that far, I was happy to send them a link to my picture if they were a good match for me. This time around when I messaged men, 95% of them DID respond. What I discovered is that I am very attractive on paper. Men see a woman who is highly educated, open-minded, compassionate, not looking to trap them into a marriage with babies, sex-positive, and more. I’ve had dozens of well-matched men interested me, many of them asking me out, some even providing phone numbers so we can arrange the dates. However, the moment they request and see a picture, the same men disappear into the woodwork. Only a few have the decency to send a final “thanks but no thanks” note. The overwhelming majority of men I approach have interest in me as a person until they discover I’m overweight. Suddenly the same very attractive woman is no longer appealing. That is the very definition of fat prejudice.

I also believe based on my personal experience that sexual and romantic attraction is rooted in much more than just physical appearance. Two of the three men I’ve been in love with in this life were friends before they were love interests. I was not incredibly physically attracted to either of them when we first met. Sexual attraction can develop over time once one has gotten to know the other person better. More often than not, that hot sexual attraction leads to relationships that are doomed to be short-lived. It’s nothing more than hormones speaking. While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having relationships like that, it’s also not wrong to open oneself to relationships that might develop from mutual interests rather than hormones. Sexual chemistry and connection can be very successful in a relationship even when there’s no immediate physical pull towards that person if one opens oneself up to the possibility.

Thus, when Chris Donaghue advocates that people should date those whom we are attracted to with no qualifiers attached, he’s perpetuating social dating dysfunction. Donaghue is very aware that people are highly influenced by the media and advertising. Study after study has shown how deeply advertising and media can influence our subconscious minds, changing what we think we want and what we think we are attracted to. Magazines, advertisements, tv shows, movies: They all tell us we “should” be attracted to slim people who fit a certain profile. Most people aren’t consciously aware enough to realize how media is warping their attractions in the dating world. It takes very rare and very strong people to step outside of those cultural ideals and date people who are attractive on the inside when their appearance is outside of that approved by social media. Most people don’t even recognize that their “types” are actually rooted in dysfunction, not genuine attraction.

One of Donaghue’s ideas that I’ve seen shared in numerous places is, “Experience a lot of sex/sexuality so you truly understand it.” This quote was directed towards a person who wanted to become a sex therapist and wanted Donaghue’s advice about it, but a statement like this also becomes shaming for those who daily fight fat prejudice in our society and who, despite their efforts, can’t find dates nonetheless sexual partners. Likewise, stating as he does in Sex Outside the Lines that “Working on oneself while solo is easy and lazy, and is an actual avoidance of doing the real work” also is a very shaming statement for those who are not single by choice  (101). It’s far better that individuals work on themselves when single rather than sitting around and feeling sorry for themselves. Just because they aren’t in a romantic relationship does not mean they are not in relationship with others, and just because they are working on themselves while solo doesn’t mean they are lazy.

Last weekend, I went on a generally enjoyable date with a man I’d met online. We messaged for a few days, discovering that we had a tremendous amount in common, so we decided to meet for dinner on the following weekend to see what the chemistry was like in real life. Despite having seen full-length pictures of me in advance, this man declined the opportunity to pursue anything else with me after that dinner because after seeing me in person he decided I was too fat. This is the reality of dating in modern America for those who are overweight. We aren’t fighting against attractions and preferences. We’re up against outright prejudice.

© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

When I rejoined the dating world, I quickly learned the term sapiosexual: One who is attracted to intelligence. The term is an apt descriptor for me and almost always for the men who are attracted to me. We are among those who find people who use their brains to be some of the sexiest lovers in the world. We want partners who can talk smart to us before they talk sexy to us. After all, the brain is the sexiest organ in the body.

While reading How Not to Fall by Emily Foster, I found the perfect romance for a sapiosexual. The novel is a work of erotic fiction custom designed for a nerd, especially an intellectual who has a fondness for psychology. A far cry from so many romances which are written for the lowest common denominator, How Not to Fall seamlessly integrates psychological theories and knowledge into its text and often into the sexual foreplay of its very smart characters. Despite its intellectual content, Foster writes in a conversational tone that is accessible to all potential readers.

Building on a taboo relationship of a post-doctoral supervisor and an undergraduate student falling for each other, the book explores the month-long relationship that the two of them consummate once she has finished school and they can legitimately be together. Charles, a post-doctoral researcher, is the slightly older, more sexually experienced man who brings Annabelle, the recently graduated virgin, into a new phase of her sexuality. Aside from many vivid sex scenes, the book contains a lot of conversation, dancing scenes, and rock climbing scenes. Foster weaves all of these together in a coherent novel that feels like an excerpt from two people’s lives, not just a bunch of sex scenes thrown together surrounded by weak dialog to sell a book.​

Most important to Foster’s objectives for this romance, the relationship between Charles and Annabelle is one built on equality and respect. From the beginning, Charles refuses to cross a line where he would be taking advantage of Annabelle because of his position of academic power over her. Once they are able to freely enter into the relationship, Charles still insists on taking the relationship slowly so that Annabelle gets to have the best introduction to sexual activity he can possibly give her. Even before they enter into slightly more kinky activities, Charles makes sure he has full consent from Annabelle and verifies that she knows and remembers their safewords (a term not used in the book) so that she can always stop whatever they are doing if it no longer feels right to her. It’s a relationship built on mutual understanding, respect and trust.

From one of the earliest conversations in the book, I began to wonder if Foster had been sitting in on an event in my life. Word for word, Charles and Annabelle said almost the same words as I had exchanged with a previous love in my life. As the novel progressed, I again saw scenes from my own life unfolding on the pages in front of me. While the novel is a fantasy, it was clear to me that this was a work grounded in reality. Much of what happens during the novel could be a part of its readers' lives.

I was hoping How Not to Fall would be a romance I could share with my teenage daughter, but I think it is still a bit too explicit for her at this point in her life. In a few years, I plan to give it to her so she can have a better understanding of what romance could and probably should look like. I also will insist that she should use condoms, something that Charles and Annabelle do not do because she is on hormonal birth control. However, even with frequent STI testing, many people carry strains of HPV that they are unaware of because they aren’t tested for them. I’ve also had a partner whose one set of STI testing did not include Herpes Simplex 1 and 2 because his doctor’s office told him that he’d know if he had them, a very erroneous idea in regard to viruses that can lie dormant for a while before manifesting. Hormonal birth control offers no protection against STIs, and thus, it is in people’s best interest to use condoms when they are not in a permanent monogamous relationship.

I breezed through this sexy intellectual novel in only an afternoon, unable to put it down for very long. How Not to Fall is a fabulous read, and I’m anxiously awaiting its sequel which is due to be published in 2017. I’ve already recommended it to several feminist sapiosexual friends whom I know will enjoy it as much as I did.

© 2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

When I first heard the title of Going Home Grown Up: A Relationship Handbook for Family Visits by Anne F. Grizzle, I knew it was a book I needed to read. Much to my delight, the fabulous content of the book more than lived up to the enticing title. While tackling a difficult and painful subject for many people, Going Home Grown Up also manages to be amusing, engaging, and highly educational. Grizzle knows her subject well and delivers it in a form that is accessible to most readers.

Early in the book, Grizzle points out something that is so amazingly clear that I sat there for quite a bit wondering how I had never thought of it before. We all know that relationships with romantic partners take effort and even work to keep alive and healthy. So why do we expect our relationships with family members to be any different? Grizzle then navigates the reader on a course of learning how to create better relationships with our families of origin and eventually with our families that we create.
​
As Grizzle takes the reader through this difficult journey of creating better relationships with often dysfunctional families of origin, she utilizes vivid imagery to help make her points all the more vivid.

References to popular culture such as The Wizard of Oz, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Robert Frost, Pinocchio, and Lenin’s tomb all fill the landscape of her book, helping make Grizzle’s points clear and well-illustrated. She has amazingly keen and highly insightful wisdom peppered throughout the book. Much of it seems obvious yet at the same time, she phrases it in ways that are novel and beneficial for creating true change.

One of the most important premises of Going Home Grown Up is that we cannot change others: We can only change ourselves. Yet despite that seemingly oppressive limitation, Grizzle helps the readers to make very significant changes in their lives which have the potential to create change in the relationships they have with their families. At the same time, Grizzle is also very realistic that sometimes the reactions from family members will be the opposite of what the reader wants. She recognizes that it all can go wrong and it all can blow up in the reader’s face. In those situations, she helps prepare the reader for the worst while hoping for the best.

The book almost becomes a workbook, peppered with questions that Grizzle encourages the reader to think or journal about. Actually doing so allows the reader to stop and absorb the lessons that Grizzle shares while simultaneously applying the information to one’s own life. While the reader may have many “aha!” moments reading the text, other insights will come from working through the challenges that Grizzle lays out for her readers in text boxes scattered throughout the book.

While the book becomes a tad too religious for my taste at several points, the vast majority is such that it is acceptable to anyone of any faith or lack thereof. Going Home Grown Up helps readers accept their families rather than holding them up to unobtainable standards. Grizzle encourages her readers to take vital steps to “grow up” in their own eyes and the eyes of their families so that future family encounters can take a different tone. Even if one cannot create change in one’s family, one can create change within one’s self that will allow greater peace with the lot we have been dealt through our families.

(The file below is a list of questions that can be used for book or discussion groups or for personal journaling.)

©2016 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

When my now ex-husband and I were in marriage therapy, our couple’s therapist would recommend books from time to time. To his surprise, I usually would read the book by the next session. One of the authors he mentioned periodically was David Deida, though he always followed it with a remark along the lines of, “DON’T read his work. I don’t want to have to spend an entire session devoted to you ranting about his views of women.” So I never read Deida while we were in joint therapy.

However, more recently I picked up his Finding God through Sex: Awakening the One of Spirit Through the Two of Flesh. When I told my individual therapist that I was reading a work of Deida’s, she replied, “How can you stand his views of women?” Clearly there is a pattern here. They both are right. I found some of his views of women downright offensive. However, if one is able to see past Deida’s erroneous thoughts around women and some of his bizarre logic, there is quite a bit of wisdom in his work. It’s rare to find a book that has so many major problems as this one does yet which really stimulates thinking and brings new and helpful ideas into one’s worldview so that the total outcome from the book is positive.

Finding God through Sex is rooted in the premise that men are seeking freedom through sex and women are seeking love. Deida believes that men use sex to escape from their responsibilities in life and to basically wear themselves out to a point of falling asleep. Women, on the other hand, use sex to connect and create intimacy. Women are trying to tune in while men are trying to tune out. Deida is proposing that both sexes can work with their natural predilections to enhance the other’s sexual experience and to connect with the great cosmic love (also known as God) that we are all part of. To create this connection with “God” in the more spiritual and cosmic sense, all people must work past their involvement in the physical and sexual details of the moment to surrender to love on a much deeper level than we are used to doing.

Deida argues that for most people, sexual awakening in a spiritual sense is often the last part of an awakening to happen. He believes most people fail to apply what they’ve learned in the rest of their lives to sexual experiences. Thus, when most people have their so-called midlife crises, what they are actually experiencing is a dissatisfaction with the shallowness of how they live their current lives. Deida argues that people should not leave their marriages but instead should work on expanding their love outward rather than focusing inward, learning to surrender to the love that is the “God” within all of us which will in turn create deeper meaning in every aspect of our lives. This love will provide the happiness and fulfill the desire that is unquenchable by anything of this world yet it will happen while remaining fully in this world. While this is a beautiful notion, it will only work if both partners are willing to explore and work towards this change in sexuality and life beliefs. For many, a partner change becomes necessary at this point to find someone who, as Deida says, matches direction in life and depth in love.

This book is a series of essays that explore wisdom and exercises that one can do to develop one’s sexual awakening. While Deida argues that the book could be practiced by someone who is celibate, it really is meant for couples in monogamous, long-term relationships. Finding God through Sex is overwhelmingly heterosexual and rooted in stereotypical ideas about male and female desire; I would not recommend it to anyone who is not a Kinsey 0. While some of Deida’s ideas are true, others are nothing more than cultural creations that Deida has locked onto. In particular, his warped idea of female sexuality includes makeup and clothing as how women can find their divine sexual selves. He fails to see that clothing and makeup are actually socially constructed ideas about what women should be, not what their deeper feminine truths are. As Deida describes his ideas of how women should explore their sexuality, he creates a fantasy girls’ night in where the women dress each other in lingerie and S&M costumes. This event resembles no girls’ night I’ve ever attended and is really nothing more than a male masterbatory fantasy. That’s not to say that Deida isn’t a great erotic writer. The beginning of each chapter starts with a very vivid and explicit recollection of sexual experiences Deida has had which leaves the reader pondering whether Deida has slept with every woman in his community. Were Deida to write a work of spiritual erotic fiction which understood women’s sexual fantasies just a bit more than this book, I suspect he would have a best seller on his hands.

It is not until the end of the book that Deida begins to explore the idea that we all have masculine and feminine sides and that there is a bit of both in each of us. His image of a river bank and the river as two lovers who shape each other is incredibly beautiful. To him, though, the gender spectrum is not very fluid, and while we might contain some of the opposing sex’s characteristics, those are just minor things to be explored and then left to be. The small amount of gender fluidity he discusses is located with his discussions of BDSM, rape fantasies, and other kinkier sexual things thus leaving the reader pondering whether he thinks that gender fluidity may just be a phase that each of us needs to explore before we come into our true heterosexual gender binary selves.

I don’t know that any woman would want to take it on, but I feel that the book could have been a five star book if Deida had co-written it with a strong and powerful woman who could have whacked Deida upside the head every time he began supplementing wisdom with his personal fantasies. The book would have benefitted greatly from a true female perspective rather than the warped one that Deida presents from this heterosexual man cave. Despite its lack of perspective at times, Finding God through Sex is a really good work about how couples can transform their sex lives into something much more powerful than they have ever experienced before.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I purchased Emotions: Freedom from Anger, Jealousy, and Fear by Osho to see what I could learn in preparation for my Meetup session on jealousy. It’s a small pocketbook of only 150 pages, and the font is very liberally spaced on those pages making the book seem even shorter than it actually is. I think the book was required to have at least ten comma splices on each page; it’s enough to make a former English teacher like me insane.

The book itself is filled with nuggets of wisdom that I found interesting to contemplate.  Osho uses a combination of prose and poetry to share his ideas. Both have powerful results in some parts of the book. I really enjoyed the section on jealousy. The section on fear was shorter and weaker than the other two sections; it felt only partially developed. One of the final chapters of the book on transformation was nothing more than a redux. Furthermore, I found Osho’s perspective to be seriously lacking in an understanding of the mind-body-spirit connection. While that’s not unusual for a Western medical doctor, for a mystic, it feels like a sign of denial or ignorance. His active meditation ideas in the back were different, but none were compelling enough to make me want to try them. A great number of them involve physical motion which is difficult at this time for me, but it may be perfect for others who have difficulty with sitting still and meditating.

Most frustrating for me was the section on anger. Osho’s view of anger is very simplistic. He believes anger requires two people, yet that fails to explain why we can have anger at ourselves. Equally errant is his belief that one can release anger in only a few minutes by changing one’s thought patterns. Either Osho is not a naturally angry person or anger does not work the same in men as it does in woman. I can go to bed, dream all night about different topics, and then wake up the next morning furious again about something that happened a day or two before. I found most of Osho’s suggestions for releasing anger (such as punching a pillow or running one’s self to a point of exhaustion) to be simplistic and pointless: They aren’t going to actually relieve the cause of the anger and often for me this type of tactic doesn’t even remove the energy of the anger either. Physical exertion just makes me tired and sore on top of being angry.

Despite all of those complaints, I do think there was a great deal of wisdom in the book. Osho is great for “sound bites.” I found many quotes that made me stop and think for a few minutes as I encountered them. I saved many of those bits of inspiration for future mantras for my blog. I’ll also be using some of his poetry about jealousy to open my Meetup session on the topic because it is incredibly beautiful.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Trigger warning: This blog post discusses infant and childhood death.
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Spoiler warning: This blog post discusses crucial elements of the plot of In the Bedroom (2001).

Other information: October is Pregancy and Infant Loss Month. This is a part of a series of articles I will be writing this month on the topic of losing a child to death.

One of my favorite books of all time is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s work of nonfiction, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Reading this book in my second year as an undergrad, I made up my mind that I wanted to go do my Ph.D. in American Studies. (The professor whose course included A Midwife’s Tale actually ended up becoming my dissertation director.) During grad school, I read Ulrich’s 1991 Bancroft Prize acceptance speech entitled, “Martha’s Diary and Mine.” In it, she describes, “At some point in all this a 250-year old lady took up residence in the loft above my bedroom, alternately cheering me on and chastizing me for my lax habits and flagging spirits.” I’ve loved that image because I found it to be very true in my own research and writing. Your subject becomes an integral part of your life.

When my daughter Rebecca died in June of 1999, I was midway through writing my dissertation on 19th century Irish-American Catholic women. These women had become a part of my life, just as Martha Ballard had become part of Ulrich’s. Ironically, it was also among these women where I found some of the greatest comfort when my daughter died. In the modern American world, we’ve reduced our infant death rate to less than 1%. Few women know the pain of having a baby or child die. This contrasts greatly with an estimated 10-40% mortality rate for children under the age of one and up to a 50% childhood death rate for the earlier 19th century. (Exact numbers are difficult to pinpoint because of poor record keeping.) When women were having an average of seven or more children, having at least one child die was a default expectation, and many women experienced the death of several of their offspring before the children reached adulthood.

Thus, as I immersed myself in the world of 19th century women while I wrote my dissertation, I found a comfort that I never would have expected. At that time, none of my living friends had experienced the death of a child, so in the modern world, I felt very alone. Yet as I read the poetry and letters which many of these bereaved 19th century women wrote, I found myself surrounded by peers even though we were separated by over a century in time. They understood my pain. They understood my loss. Many of them had lost far more than I had, and yet somehow, they managed to carry on.

All of these thoughts came flooding back to me recently as I watched In the Bedroom (2001). This mistitled movie is incompletely described as “A New England couple's college-aged son dates an older woman who has two small children and an unwelcome ex-husband.” However, the movie is far more than that. It’s actually a very powerful drama about parents losing a child to a senseless death. In one scene, the local priest, Father McCasslin (Jonathan Walsh), is speaking with bereaved mother Ruth Fowler (Sissy Spacek) in the cemetery adjacent to the church where she had just been visiting her son’s grave. Father McCasslin says,

The character of Ruth Fowler was not powerfully moved by this vision, but I was because I understood all too well the pain and comfort that McVey described. There is something powerful to being surrounded by those who understand your pain. A local blogger who had experienced the death of one of her sons once described it in a post as joining the sorority that no one wanted to be a member of. You didn’t sign up for the sorority, and you didn’t want to be there. None of the other members wanted to be there either. And yet, there you all were, sharing a bond of sisterhood that no one ever wants another to have to endure.

I am grateful to those women of the nineteenth century whose words reached out from the paper and microfilm to comfort me in my time of bereavement. They helped less my pain and helped me to feel like others understood all too well what I was going through. The internet now provides a multitude of venues for bereaved mothers (and fathers) to connect with others like themselves so that they can find others who have endured the same horrible losses. Compassionate solidarity in suffering can make a huge difference in reducing the pain of life’s greatest burdens.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(Apologies in advance for the super long post!)

Three years ago when Jenny Lawson published her first book, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir), I was still mostly homebound, not yet well enough to attend social functions. The night Lawson read at BookPeople, I threw myself a pity party as I sat at home staring at the clock knowing that just 20 minutes from my house there was an event happening that I wanted to attend but my health would not let me be at. It was crazy making for me.

This time around, my life is very different both personally and professionally. I am so grateful to be in a much better place. I’m still not able to do nearly what most people do on an ordinary day, but I am doing so much more than three years ago. Hence, I made plans to attend Lawson’s reading of her new book, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things, switching custody nights and various appointments so that I would have enough energy to attend the event. Yesterday afternoon, my body tried to give me a migraine, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from attending. I took the drugs I can take for migraines and headed out.

As I sat waiting to turn left onto Lamar to get to the bookstore, my stomach started churning with nervousness. Despite how much better I am doing, there’s always the fear that I will get to an event and not be able to physically handle it. I do still have to leave certain situations when the chemical fragrance is more than I can handle. After the issues I had last week around disability accommodations, I was really worried about what the Universe might throw at me. It’s still a physical challenge for me to get from point A to point B, and sometimes I just can’t do it no matter how much determination I have.

When I arrived at Bookpeople, the parking lot was full but mercifully the two disabled spots closest to the door were still available. Once in the building, I debated the stairs versus elevator issues I have, and I decided to take the stairs mainly because it was what other people were doing and since I haven’t been in BookPeople for 11+ years, I wasn’t sure where I was going. When I arrived at the top of the stairs at 6:40 for a 7 pm reading, it was already standing room only. There were no chairs available in my vision nor were there any places to sit on the floor anywhere within visual range of the podium. I approached a store employee and asked him if they had disabled seating; I let him know that I could sit on the floor but I couldn’t stand for the event. He asked if I had called ahead, and I had not because it hadn’t dawned on me to do so. I now know for next time! However, they had a few extra seats set aside as reserved for those who needed them. The reserved seats were in the first and second rows. At first, former Catholic that I am, I tried to sit in the second row (because Catholics never sit in the front row in church unless it’s the only available seating, and even then, sometimes they prefer to stand). However, I quickly discovered that I couldn’t sit in that second row because the seats were too close to the row in front of them and I couldn’t bend my legs at an angle that was relatively painless. So I moved up to the front row between another woman who was likely in her 20s or 30s and a senior citizen couple. None of them were loaded with perfume, thank heavens, so I was ok for the entire reading.

While we were sitting there waiting for the presentation to begin (15 minutes late), the older couple next to me were chatting with each other. To preface this, I have to say that I have issues around fame and people’s private lives being in the public eye. I had to do a great deal of personal work before I could be comfortable with having a website with my picture on it on the web. So part of me still feels strongly that what people choose to share publicly should be respected as the limit; paparazzi, reporters and fans should respect those limits. However, this couple next to me were talking about Hailey and Victor, Jenny Lawson’s daughter and husband, in a weird way that sounded like they knew everything about the Lawsons just from her blog. It was kind of freaking me out that I had managed to end up seated next to a couple of senior citizen stalkers who seemed to think they were actually part of Lawson’s life. It also was a reality call for me to recognize my own prejudice that stalkers are only young people. These senior citizens were teaching me otherwise.

Before the reading began, a BookPeople manager came over to our section with another employee and told us that he would be escorting us upstairs via the elevator to get our books signed first. I actually had not bought a book because I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to handle the full evening and because waiting to get it signed at the last book signing I attended at another store was hard on my body. If I had known that BookPeople was aware of this kind of issue for the disabled, I definitely would have pre-ordered one; I now know that for future events as well. However, I’m actually grateful I didn’t order the hardcover because after listening to Lawson read two chapters last night, I really want to listen to the audiobook. I’m not a fan of audiobooks 99.9% of the time which makes this is an exception to my norm. Lawson also mentioned during her “no pants party” on Tuesday night that there is an extra chapter in the audiobook, so there’s that incentive as well.

When Jenny Lawson finally made her appearance, she looked around with grateful and amazed tears in her eyes and said, “Holy shit, you guys! There are so many of you here." She was greeted with a raucous round of laughter that along with her comment set the tone for the whole evening. It was a truly amazing crowd; I’d bet there were 250-300 people there. Lawson’s phone wouldn’t let her take a panoramic of the whole crowd because it was too big! (My leg is on the far right of the top photo; I’m cut out of it mostly, though.)

Lawson began by reading two chapters from Furiously Happy. After reading one in which she describes the advantages of passing out with a speculum in one’s vagina, she commented that she had been practicing looking up and making eye contact while she read about her body parts at the gynecologist’s office. When she actually did look up during the reading, she saw her grandparents listening to her read about her vagina. She then said, “Hi Granny and Pop-Pop!” and waved at the senior citizens sitting next to me. Oh. No wonder they sounded like they knew the Lawson family so well. They weren’t actually crazy stalkers after all! Not even once did it dawn on me that they might be relatives of hers even though she lives in central Texas.

Moving on to the Q&A session, Lawson began by addressing a question about parenting with mental illness; she gave a similar answer during her No Pants Party. She said that the amount of openness one can have with a child about one’s condition is going to depend on the age and personality of the child. Lawson said that her daughter Hailey knows now that she has mental illness, but Hailey knows that no matter how bad things are for Lawson that Lawson will always have time for her. Even if all they can do is watch Doctor Who or Miss Fisher’s Murder Mystery Series together on the couch, it’s still time spent together. Lawson does not allow her daughter to read her blog though many of her daughter’s friends do. Hailey does get to read anything written about her and has veto power about what is said. There are some things about Hailey that Lawson doesn't share because she doesn't want her to be tormented by mean 14 year old girls. When Lawson does share something to Hailey, she reads the blog entry out loud so she can censor the language in it. Lawson believes that most kids are far more perceptive than we realize when it comes to what is going on around them.

Another woman from the audience asked how one balances taking care of one’s self when dealing with a mental illness and still actually managing to get writing done. Lawson responded that a great deal of it is about respecting the need to not write at times. She admitted that writing about certain topics can be triggering for her, especially the darkest parts. At those times, she had to give herself permission not to write and just take care of herself. She said her editor helped her to see that sometimes the best breakthroughs for writer’s block come when engaged in recreation such as when she was refilling her creative cup such as watching Doctor Who or reading. In addition, Lawson mentioned the phrase, “If you can’t write, just sit down and write.” She said that while that used to make no sense to her, she’s learned that some days that she has to write stuff that’s not very good but which will eventually evolve. Lawson said she’s got a thousand pages of stuff that may someday actually be good enough but they’re not there yet.

On a lighter note, someone asked Lawson if there was a piece of taxidermy she really regretted not buying. Lawson said that she limits herself in that the pieces must not be too expensive, they must have died a natural death, and they need to be old. She said the one piece that she is still haunted by is a unicorn at Paxton Gate in San Francisco which is actually a French horse head. She said it’s not white like the typical unicorn but brown and actually rather jinky looking. The unicorn is missing some of its teeth and is “so messed up.” From there, Lawson went on a very long-winded and extremely funny diversion about her Bank of America credit card recently being put on a fraud suspicion hold because Victor had bought a taxidermied beaver for her at Paxton Gate while he was there with a friend. Any transcript of the story would simply not do justice to Lawson’s fabulous storytelling ability. She’s just one of those people you could listen to for hours while she talked about almost anything because she could find a way to make it funny.

When asked which author Lawson herself would line up to meet, she said that she still has difficulty doing this because she’ll get in line to meet an idol and then panics when she gets close to the front. She said she is a fangirl of anyone who manages to finish anything, but more specifically she loves Neil Gaiman whom she got to meet backstage at an event. She also loves David Sedaris but she hasn’t met him; her friend Dylan Brody opened for Sedaris and got him to autograph a book to Lawson which says, “Any friend of Dylan’s is a whore.” (See comment 68 here). Most of all, she would bring Ray Bradbury back from the dead because he really does it for her.

A more recent fan asked Jenny Lawson why she began the Bloggess. Lawson said that many years ago she was working at a non-profit in human resources ironically teaching people how to act appropriately. She had actually started writing as a child as an outlet for her anxiety disorder. Eventually another mom blogger in Houston decided to quit her job because that blogger didn’t think one could be a good blogger and a good parent. Lawson decided she must be the crappiest parent ever because she volunteered to not only write on that blog but to do it for free. However, she was frequently getting in trouble for what she wrote, so eventually she started her own blog where she could write whatever she wanted without censorship. She said she now blogs to read the comments because the humor from her readers makes her laugh quite often. (And it's true. While I generally abide by the rule "never read the comments," I love reading the responses on her blog.)

Lawson ended the evening with a great question from a man in the audience: “What do you think of The new Doctor [Who]?” Lawson asked if they couldn’t discuss something easier like abortion. After loud laughter from the audience, Lawson said that she is still getting used to him. She thinks that it is an interesting take on The Doctor, and he is “way alien” but doesn’t make a very good human. He’s definitely not her favorite, but for her the pinnacle was Doctor Donna. And with that, Jenny Lawson closed the Q&A and headed upstairs to beginning the signing portion of the evening.

After 75 minutes sitting in the same chair, my body was definitely ready to leave. So much has changed for me physically since just four months ago when I went to see Chris Harrison's book release. When I left the book signing this time, I could feel that my body was exhausted, but I wasn’t having many of the symptoms I had when I walked out of the last event. I didn’t go into a lot of pain last night (aside from the migraine I was already trying to fight off), and I slept really well-- no fibro flares or any other assorted misery. I am so happy that my health is finally returning to a place where attending events like this is a reality for me. It was a wonderful evening filled with great people watching an abundant laughter. I was also incredibly grateful to have a positive experience around disability accommodation thanks to BookPeople instead of the obstacles I’ve encountered in so many other places of late.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

When I originally started my business, one of my first clients asked a very pertinent but surprising question during our initial discussion. I had suggested to her that she might want to try meditating, and she responded, “I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of meditating, but how do I meditate?” The question caught me off-guard, because for me, that is a question like, “How do you tie your shoes?” I don’t think about tying my shoes. I just instinctively do it, though when I was four and learning how to tie my shoes, that certainly wasn’t true. It took a lot of practice before the action because intuitive. Likewise, meditation is something that I just do. I don’t think about it. So being forced to stop and describe the process was more of a challenge for me than I expected.

Since then, I have read many books and e-books looking for a great introduction to meditating to recommend to clients. Many of the books have been truly awful, loaded with the egos of the authors or with dogmatic approaches to meditation that don’t allow for individual differences or challenges. Meditation: A Beginner's Guide (original title: Seeing The Wider Picture) by Charlotte Parnell is the first book I have thought did a fabulous job with how it described meditation, intuition, and the benefits of both. I’m a bit puzzled as to where or how I recently acquired this book since I have a new hardback copy and it’s not in print any more though lots of used copies are available on the internet and a digital edition is available as well. The book really needs to be edited both to reflect the new title and to correct many minor grammatical errors through the text. (A better new title would likely have been Meditation: A Beginner's Guide to Seeing the Wider Picture thus eliminating the inconsistencies with the title references throughout the book.) However, once one understands what on earth the author is talking about when she refers to the (old) title, the book progresses in an easy to read fashion. 

Among the topics Parnell covers successfully are journaling after meditating, frequency of meditation, atmosphere, position, breathing, relaxation, visualization, self-healing, and benefits. All of the topics are covered in a non-judgmental way that encourages the readers to explore their own experiences and find what is right for them. While Parnell gives a variety of options with regard to every topic, she makes it clear that what works for one person may be wrong for another, something that many other authors can’t seem to grasp. Parnell sees the importance of meditation is in its ability to open us to our higher selves and a higher state of being; she acknowledges that a belief in a god is not necessary for this though the book is very spiritual (not religious) in tone. She also covers a bit of the basic info about grounding and protection, topics that are often avoided in meditation books but which are vital to metaphysical safety.

The last part of the book is ten meditation exercises. I was a bit disappointed in these as many of them are very similar to each other, though Parnell explains why she keeps them so similar as a teaching strategy. Still, I would have preferred more variety in them. I singled out six of the exercises that I think would make good short (five minute) guided meditations for the Meetup group I lead.

Overall, I am delighted to find this short pocketbook which provides such a great introduction to meditation as a spiritual and healing venture. I will be recommending it to many clients who are seeking to begin a spiritual meditation practice as they work on healing themselves.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(I received an Advance Reader Copy of Upside from the Goodreads Giveaways program. The opinions expressed in this review are mine and mine alone. Previous blog posts I have written on Upside are located here and here.) 

One of the things that drives me nuts in life is when people use denial as a justified coping technique. They create distorted and dysfunctional mythologies around their particular issues which allow them to believe that they have healed when the reality is far from it. I am not unfamiliar with this technique on a personal level: I used it unsucessfully for many years myself. I often see the Law of Attraction warped in this way as people believe that if they confront negative aspects of themselves, then they will draw the negative to them. Thus, they believe it's best to ignore and deny those negative issues. However, the reality couldn't be further from the truth. When we have something negative festering within us due to repression and/or denial, we continue to attract similar energies to us in order to help us heal that wounded part.

As I read through Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth by Jim Rendon, I cringed far more than once as I read the words of those who had purportedly experienced post-traumatic growth. Rendon held these people up as examples of those who had been able to turn a traumatic life experience such as cancer or an accident into a motivation for positive growth and change. All of these people had done just that, and all had experienced growth and gratitude for the positive change their traumas brought to their lives. However, many of the people who were quoted used words that clearly demonstrated that a deeper level of healing was still needed in their lives.

Rendon recognizes denial as a problematic coping technique. He writes, "Some people try to block memories of the trauma entirely. Unfortunately, that doesn't work. The memories remain and can be triggered with little warning by seemingly unrelated sights, sounds, or semlls. Other people protect themselves from the trauma by separating all emotion from the events. But this often leads to behavior problems... And some people simply try to duck the issue entirely, using what is called avoidance-- making great efforts to avoid any events or siutations that might bring traumatic memories flooding back." Yet even though he recognizes the problems around denial and avoidance, Rendon's book still utilizes examples of people in denial as those who have experienced post-traumatic growth.

One common method of avoiding one's one true situation and one's horrible pain is by comparing one's pain to others'. In Upside, one man in a wheelchair states, "'I feel normal because I can help these people. I have the use of my hands. Some people can't feed themselves.'" This is a very clear example of using someone else's pain to ignore the reality of pain of one's own situation. The author's own father denies the true depths of his own pain from World War II by stating that "he hadn't gone through anything like what today's soldiers experience in combat." A researcher cited in the book even advocates this method which I see as a cousin to avoidance as uplifting and healing. She says that by "comparing their terrible plight to the even worse situation of so many, they could begin to see how they were in fact better off than some. And that might give them a tiny strand of something positive to hold on to." However, as I've written before, many people are the "worse off" ones, and being placed at the bottom of the healing heap by others with struggles does not help those in the worst case scenarios. Instead, this method of healing can lead to a great deal of pain for both those using it and those who are compared against.

Rendon also presents patients who are obviously still living with horrific side effects of trauma in their lives. One former soldier in Iraq still suffers from severe sleep deprivation and difficulties in relationships. Rendon writes that "The horrors that he witnessed have not faded with time," a true sign that healing has not happened on a deep level because the pain should fade during healing even if the memories remain. Yet Rendon holds this person up as one who has experienced post-traumatic growth because even though he has not healed, he is still able to help others. Examples like this lead me to question how much healing is necessary to achieve post-traumatic growth and how much healing is needed to be fully healed because the two are clearly not the same.

In some cases, I feel what Rendon has lauded as post-traumatic growth is actually denial and not post-traumatic growth at all. He shares the story of Bob Carey and his wife Linda Lancaster-Carey's Tutu Project which has brought laughter and healing to many who are dealing with cancer. Yet at the same time, Carey states, "'One of the reasons I do what I do is that [the possiibility of Lancaster-Carey's death] scares the hell out of me.'" Rather than confronting his own pain and fear, Carey is avoiding it through humor and art. To me, it's questionable whether this situation should be called post-traumatic growth even though it is using a trauma to create good in the world. According to Rendon, Carey continues to talk "critically about himself, his motives, and his work, as if the entire enterprise might fall apart if he were to relax and enjoy the good press and the success the couple has earned with the Tutu Project." To me, this is a sign of someone who is not willing to actually process grief and fear rather than a sign of growth.

While Rendon's work does not examine these options, I have experienced great healing from alternative therapies which address PTSD from different perspectives. Unlike the mainstream therapeutic desensitization technique which re-traumatizes patients with PTSD by forcing them to relive and discuss the worst of their experiences, it is possible to slowly and carefully unpack the traumas that contribute to PTSD in such a way that the patient will minimize new trauma. It is not a 100% pain free method, unfortunately, but it is a far less painful one than what the mainstream offers. I am going to periodically be offering a low-cost trauma and PTSD workshop for therapists and patients discussing how one can truly process and relieve trauma which is stored in the body. It's a workshop I wish that I could give to many people who are suffering from deep pain and not finding relief with current mainstream therapeutic options.

Unlike one bereaved parent in Upside who declares that "Five years is nothing for a grieving parent. The pain lasts a lifetime," I believe that it is possible to lessen or eliminate the pain of trauma without desecrating the memories of those whom we have lost in death. There are ways to find this peace without retraumatizing those who have already suffered greatly. The memories will always be there, but being free of fear and grief is truly a possibility. I know because I have experienced it as a bereaved parent. Not only have I reached a point where I no longer feel that brutal pain relating to my daughter's death, but I am also able to see all the positive things her death brought about. While I would never say I am grateful for my loss, I am able to say that I am incredibly grateful for the changes it has brought about.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

For years I have seen quotes and excerpts by Marianne Williamson on the web. I've always been captivated by the fluent poetic nature of her prose and her beautiful thoughts so wonderfully explained. As my mentor and I were discussing the nature of love a few weeks ago, I decided it was time for me to read some of Williamson's work once I finished off the other book I was reading at that time. I pulled Enchanted Love: The Mystical Power of Relationships off of my bookcase and proceeded to read 2/3 of it in the first sitting because it is such a smooth and easy read. The concepts contained within are deep and powerful, but Williamson explains them so clearly that it feels like reading a work of fiction.

Enchanted Love is a series of short essays, prayers and poems around finding a sacred romantic love. Along the way, Williiamson describes judgemental relationships that fall far short of a sacred ideal. She talks about sex, divorce, God, and the reflections of love on the greater world. Beneath all of her ideas are the concepts that we partner with others to work on our deepest wounds and that the love we exchange with each other is actually the love of the Divine. While strongly disagree with some of her discussions about gender in relationships, the majority of the book was powerful to read and contemplate.

As I read through the earlier part of the book, the part that discussed relationships done wrong, I saw my former marriage with my ex-husband very clearly in her words. We were judgmental of each other, we did not and in some cases could not support each other in the ways that each wanted to be supported, and we didn't help each other grow as individuals. The relationship was not one that could have ever achieved enchanted love status. Yet as I read through Williamson's statements about midlife, divorce, and sacred love, I very clearly saw the relationship I want to have with my next husband. If he hasn't read this book by the time we've met, I'm going to hand him my copy and say, "This! This is what I am looking for in a relationship!" 

I've already recommended this book to one friend as she works to heal wounds from a previous partner because I thought it would be very useful to her to understand the "why" of her relationship's demise. I also thought that the book coould greatly help her and her current partner grow in their relationship. I definitely expect to be recommending Enchanted Love to many others in the future.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

When I first started reading Embrace the Unlovable: How to Eliminate Shame, Guilt, and Self-Judgments and Come Home to Yourself Using the Groundbreaking The Compassionate Self-Love Method by Amyra Mah, I was drawn in by her examples of herself as a young girl being emotionally abused by mother and sister while growing up. I recognized much of what she described including her experiences in a Catholic girls’ school that made her ashamed of her body and taught her that femininity is something to be hidden. Mah explains that shame is the wide-spread root of our self-hatred which conventional therapy is limited in its ability to heal. As a result, through channeling information from higher powers, Mah has developed what she dubs The Compassionate Self-Love Method which she presents as a way to heal shame and other deeply rooted issues.

Unfortunately, the book started going downhill after her introductory chapters. My “something is wrong” detectors started going off, so I went and Googled the author. While she calls herself a therapist, she could be prosecuted in the US for doing so because she is not officially licensed; however, Mah lives in Thailand where laws are likely different. Her website states, “I considered going back to school and being trained in psychotherapy, and enrolling in courses that would qualify me to work in the personal development field.  But at the back of my mind, there was a voice that said I didn’t need to go through the traditional route of learning.” In the US, the correct term for Mah would be a life coach. However, in a very telling section of her book, Mah shames life coaches and declares them to be people who don’t help with healing. As a holistic life coach who focuses almost solely on healing, I am certain this is completely wrong. Despite the work she has done on herself, Mah’s own inferiority complex still includes needing to put others down to make herself feel better.

Mah is not well read at all and it shows. The book contains no footnotes or endnotes and only cites one other author whose work is on eating disorders. Mah makes a lot of claims about other studies that aren't true based on what I've read, but she claims theses studies that I have read don’t even exist which merely reflects her lack of education. Mah wrote Embrace the Unlovable in 2014 and published it in 2015. However, Brene Brown has been researching and publishing a lot longer than that, just for starters. To write a book on shame without mentioning her works is puzzling at best. In addition, Shakti Gawain has been publishing on topics and healing related to Mah’s work for decades. There are many more as well. Mah is not familiar with their ideas, and if she's writing on shame from a holistic healing standpoint, she needs to acknowledge the big names.

Throughout the book, Mah puts a great deal of emphasis on how The Compassionate Self-Love Method is different and special, and as a result, Mah comes across as one of those people who think they've invented the wheel. Yet this is the same method, minus the fancy name, that so many therapists have used with me in the past decade as I worked on healing. I think that the Mah has assembled ideas that other authors/healers have used for decades and put them together in a novel way, but if the author was better read, she would know that her ideas are not as stunningly new as she thinks. I absolutely believe that she was channeling this information, and I agree it is being presented in a new format, but at their core, the ideas are not new. As Audre Lorde said, “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.”

Instead of rushing to self-publish as Mah did, it would have been better for her to find an editor to help her correct lots of little errors throughout the text. Her writing is beautiful in terms of style, but the book is very repetitious and needs the help of an editor with a red pen with a lot of ink. As mentioned above, Mah needs to read and document other sources if she wants to bring her book up a notch. I understand that she was trying to function just as a channel, but the result is a weaker book. Many of the ideas she presents are not new, and if she’d done more research on the correct authors, she would have found this to be true. Mah also uses terms such as “projections” that actually have the accepted name of “mirrors” in holistic healing. Not having the vocabulary to communicate to her audience is problematic. I also strongly believe that Mah would benefit from a professional mentor, someone who has been practicing holistic healing for decades and who could point out to her where she is presenting old ideas in new ways so that appropriate credit is given.

So after all that criticism, did I find anything worthy in the book? Yes, though I will recommend the book with reservations. The Compassionate Self-Love Method (CSL) is in a way the opposite of the Law of Attraction which Mah indirectly but repeatedly bashes throughout the book. The goal of CSL is to embrace and love the parts of you that you don’t like rather than trying to wish them away through affirmations. To enact the CSL, one needs to:

• "Identify what that the problem/issue/judgment/shame is."
  
• "Connect with that aspect. Accept it as a real part of you."
  
• "Embrace and love the undesired aspect without trying to change it at all. Send love until you feel a shift in your perception of that aspect."

As Mah writes, you know that healing has happened “When you recall the event that triggered the shameful feelings in you,[and] you feel neutral about it.”

On the surface, this is a perfectly legitimate way to heal deeply buried wounds. As Mah argues, our culture tends to run from our pain rather than facing it. I have healed many stored pains in my body by working with them rather than denying them. However, part of the approach Mah advocates perpetuates judgment and blame. For example, she writes, “Send love to the aspect of you that is a bad mother.” Instead I would advocate people try a kinder, gentler way to facing our pain. In my words, people should “Send love to the aspect of you that doesn’t always live up to the ideals you strive for. None of us are perfect, and all of us make decisions and errors as parents that we wish we could change. Love this part of you that is trying its best but doesn’t always reach perfection. It is not a bad part of you. It is simply an area of you that is working on growth.” This way one is not re-injuring and/or harming oneself by continuing to place negative external labels on parts that are inherent to us.

I especially think that Mah missed the boat in terms of external labeling when she discusses terms like "whore" and "slut." Her female relatives called her by foreign equivalents of such names when she was eight years old. No eight year old child is a whore or a slut (and arguably no person should ever be called by those terms). If a child is sexually active at that age, it is likely rape, incest and/or sexual trauma. The child is not asking for sex because the child can not give consent. So as an adult, to go back and try to heal yourself by embracing the part of you that is a slut (Mah’s method) is very toxic. Instead, I would recommend embracing the part of you that loves sex and sexuality. That is a healthy aspect of all of us that society unfortunately shames in many instances. So when trying to rid oneself of that shame related to sexuality, embrace that you are sexual. You do love sex. But you are not the negative projection of sexuality that someone else forced upon you. That is their trouble, and you do not need to take it on or hold onto it. Love yourself for all your sexual decisions, even if you regret some of them, but don’t buy into other people’s judgments.

I believe Embrace the Unlovable is a step in the right direction towards healing deep wounds that mainstream psychology is not always able to heal. However, the book still needs a lot of editing and improving and the method needs some revising before it will be of true benefit to most people. I hope Mah is able to find the mentor and editor she needs to make this good book into an amazing one.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(This post is based on an Advance Reader Copy of Upside won through Goodreads’ First Reads program.)

As I read through Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth by Jim Rendon, I had plenty of thoughts that didn’t necessarily fit in my official review of the book. The book certainly prompted some thinking and questioning on my part; I always appreciate it when a book stimulates my brain cells. Some of these questions I’m asking probably haven’t been answered by studies yet, so I can’t fault the author for not including things that don’t yet exist! The following are some of those thoughts shared in a rather random order.

- It wasn’t until very late in Upside that a divorce was mentioned among the case studies of those who have undergone trauma. However, I suspect that this representation is not accurate. Chronic illness and PTSD were major contributions toward my divorce, and I know I’m not alone in that. I’d be curious as to what the actual divorce rate is among those who suffer from PTSD as well as what the divorce rate is among those who suffer from PTSD but have come to a place of positive growth. Further questioning would ask how many people saw their divorce as a part of their positive growth (as I definitely do).

- As I read the chapter on family support, I questioned, “What about those who didn’t have family support?” I would like to see a study of how support for patients with cancer compares to those with other illnesses. Because Rendon focused on cancer, he may not be aware that other diseases actually can cause families to abandon loved ones. This certainly was my situation with extended family, and again, it was a contribution to the end of my marriage. In my experience with late disseminated Lyme disease which is legally diagnosed as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, compassion and support was not overwhelming. In many cases, friends and extended family abandoned me and my family unit. One extended family member pointed out to me not so subtly that two other family members with type 1 diabetes and gallstones had REAL health problems (implying that mine were not significant, real and/or valid despite the fact that I was homebound and mostly bedbound at that point).

- While Rendon completely failed to discuss the problems surround childbirth and infant loss as they apply to women, he did devote a chapter to a group of dads who have lost children. This is a rare perspective that is often ignored in our culture, and I appreciate that he shared this reality with the world. Too often, men’s grief is poorly processed and disregarded contributing to the ongoing problem in our society of men who are out of touch with their emotions including grief.

- I felt like the chapter on religion and spirituality was one of the weakest. From what was written, I suspect that the author does not identify with religion or spirituality and may in fact be hostile towards them. I felt like he neglected the major differences between religion and spirituality, for they are two different things. It is very possible to be spiritual without being religious. I also wondered as I read the chapter how many people with PTSD experience a radical change in their beliefs or spirituality. In my life I went from being Catholic to being agnostic to experiencing PTSD and becoming highly spiritual without identifying with any religion (and in fact shunning most of them). I suspect I am not alone in this process of spiritual growth that is a part of personal growth with PTSD. This spiritual growth I experienced is a far different experience than someone becoming more vested in an established religion or turning to their pastor for counseling.

- Rendon argues that support groups are instrumental in the personal growth of individuals because they allow those with PTSD to be with those “who get it.” On one hand this is very true. However, I am curious about the reality of support groups for a wider population. I actually found that the pessimism and negativity of many support groups were pulling me down and were impeding my personal growth. They weren’t “better-informed optimists” as Rendon writes. Instead, they were people filled with unhealthy attitudes, bitterness, and often ignorance. I switched to digest for many online groups to avoid reading the posts of the worst offenders; some groups I left altogether. The two health related in-person groups I tried attending, one for those who had lost a baby and one for those who were chemically sensitive, I quickly left because the energy in them was awful. My better-informed optimism did not fit there. Thus, I would be curious about studies that showed that support groups actually have an ability to hamper personal growth rather than assist it. My experiences show that this is a potential reality.

- I cringed at the idea of 46 pills being a lot as Rendon dramatically presents when discussing a cancer patient. I currently take 14 Western medical pills per day plus 65 pill supplements, seven doses of liquid supplements, and a nebulizer treatment per day. At times my pill total has been well over 100 a day. This is what it has taken to get me functional and to continue to heal. I look forward to dropping back to “only” 46 pills and then the day when I need less than 20 per day to maintain my health. Again, if Rendon had talked to people with other health issues outside of cancer, his perspective would have been broadened and enlightened in many ways.

- Rendon has an implicit (and very valid in my opinion) judgment of how deficient psychological treatment is for soldiers and vets with PTSD. He also notes how others involved in other traumas also received very little or no psychotherapy as part of their recovery processes. It would be great to see what the studies show about why this happens other than the lack of funding for mental health care that is an endemic problem in our nation.

- I appreciated the way Rendon approached the topic of “gratitude as a way of life.” As I’ve noted in another blog post, gratitude is the only way I got through many days when my illness was at its worst. I think most people who have not undergone a major trauma understand what gratitude really is and what it can do for us.

- The chapter on activity and exercise as healing was very frustrating to me. I think this is a concept that is fairly well understood in our society as almost all less-than-informed healthcare practitioners I have worked with over the years have pushed exercise as one of the main solutions to healing. However, there is an important distinction between using exercise during a time of hellish illness and using it after one has regained significant health. Rendon discusses women who have survived breast cancer and now row together; he mentions but does not dwell on the fact that they could not have done this kind of activity when they were in the worst phases of their treatment. That distinction is very important for those undergoing health trauma because the overwhelming pressure to exercise when they are too sick to do so can be very emotionally defeating. As someone whose Lyme disease has caused chronic fatigue syndrome, I have had to deal with the conflict that exercise can actually cause more damage than good a great deal of the time, and our society does not seem to understand that because it is so pro-exercise as the cure to all that ails you.

- I really loved that Rendon stressed the importance of not pushing post-traumatic growth on those with PTSD. This book would have been devastating to read in the worst years of my illness; I was not ready to hear its message. I definitely would not give the book to someone who was at a point when they were at rock bottom. The lesson of “bitter blessings” is one that each person has to come to individually on their own time.

- When discussing one person who has survived brain cancer, Rendon reveals the very unhealthy brave face platitudes that are a very problematic part of emotional health in our society. However, Rendon doesn't expand on the problem that "the brave face" ideology creates in relation to PTSD. Rendon writes, “[The patient with brain cancer] maintained a brave face, but beneath it all he was terrified. ‘He never once said, “This really sucks,”’ said [his best friend]. ‘But you could see it in his eyes, you could see him thinking, Holy heck what am I going to do?’” Society expects those with chronic illness to hide behind those brave faces. They’re expected not to show the pain they’re in or the suffering they’re enduring. If they do show that illness, that fear, that pain, that loss, then they risk losing those around them who are unwilling or unable to deal with the realities of health challenges including the possibility of death. This only contributes to the issues surrounding PTSD when one is expected to put on a brave face but is actually falling apart inside.

- I would be curious to see studies about those who manage to achieve positive post-traumatic growth without most of the key items that Rendon cites as contributory factors. I am someone who is lacking in extended family support. I was isolated and alone because of my chemical sensitivities. I was the person whom others looked at and said, “It doesn’t get much worse than that.” Yet somehow I have grown in ways I never would have believed possible. I wonder how other characteristics such as personality and intelligence factor in for those whom growth seemed to be unlikely to happen even according to the standards Rendon establishes.

- Finally, in the last paragraphs of Upside, Rendon writes, “And given that they came so close to death, that they lost so many things they once took for granted, they understand on a much deeper level, in a much more informed way, what it means to be alive.” This association of PTSD with facing death is a flawed one, and it’s something that contributes to a large portion of people enduring PTSD not seeking appropriate help in my opinion. Our society erroneously interprets PTSD to mean former soldiers or those whose lives were endangered. Yet as Rendon demonstrates throughout the book, for many people, PTSD does not result from a life threatening event. I would have added a clause to this sentence about how “some have come so close to death.”

(I do have another upcoming blog post motivated by Upside that I will link to once it publishes.)

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(I am reviewing an Advance Reader Copy of this book won through Goodreads’ First Reads program.)

I came to Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth by Jim Rendon as a woman who has endured PTSD caused by multiple sources: abuse, childbirth, health trauma, and if you believe in past lives, World War II. I have been able to achieve major healing with most of my wounds through alternative therapies; conventional therapy was only serving to retraumatize me. Yet as someone with a Ph.D., I have a great deal of respect for science and the advances it can help bring. Rendon's work questions why so many people who have endured traumas and PTSD are able to come to a place of positive growth through examining the influence of personal narratives, community support, honest communication, optimistic thinking, religion, creative outlets, physical exercise, fellow sufferers, and therapy. The studies and examples Rendon cites demonstrate that these factors can all contribute to a lifelong positive change.

Rendon’s work is firmly grounded in scientific studies which demonstrate how trauma can lead to growth. The book is well-researched, fluently integrated and easy to read. Rendon’s writing style makes academia accessible to the general public. Despite the heavy topic, I breezed through Upside much quicker than I read most nonfiction books. The stories Rendon relates about others who have suffered traumas are painful to read, but only one was horrifying to me because of the explicit violence it contains. (For those who are highly sensitive like me, I recommend skipping the details in the last chapter on Jake Harriman's trauma, an event that occurred in the war in Iraq.)

Rendon was drawn to the topic of post-traumatic growth because his father was a Holocaust survivor; he makes no indication of having endured major trauma in his own life either explicitly or implicitly. There were times where I felt his text would have benefited from an extra reading and feedback before publication by those who have lived through trauma themselves because Rendon’s perspective sometimes doesn’t quite grasp the full reality. However, for the most part, Rendon does an excellent job of vividly relating the pain and the growth that his subjects experienced. He also gives one of the best summaries I’ve read about how PTSD creates a hypersensitive response in individuals whose “fight or flight” response is perpetually in overdrive. The first few chapters of the book could be incredibly helpful to someone trying to understand their loved one’s new reactions to the world.

If one were to survey the trauma-inducing events that Rendon discusses in detail, one would conclude that trauma is caused by cancer, accidents, warfare, and natural disasters. I realize that Rendon had limited space in his book, but he chose to relate cancer patient after cancer patient’s experience. This is typical of our culture which actually creates additional trauma for those who aren’t enduring cancer: they are second class citizens in the world of medical trauma. This blog post discusses how Lyme patients like me are abandoned by friends and medical practitioners in their search for health while simultaneously being told, “At least it isn’t cancer.” By not addressing other illnesses beyond cancer and accidents, Rendon contributes to the cultural mythologies of what illnesses “should” look like.

My largest complaint about Upside is that it contains a blatant disregard for women’s traumas. It was not until chapter five that Rendon discussed a female case study; from there on, women were mentioned fairly regularly in the book. However, Rendon does not discuss a single case of rape, sexual harassment, or abuse in detail. These are major causes of trauma, but they are barely mentioned in passing and there are no specific examples of them in the text. Most frustrating to me was how Rendon described trauma from childbirth: “People can be traumatized from the happiest of situations: childbirth.” While on one level this is a true statement, on another level it shows a total lack of understanding for the epidemic proportioned reality of what most women still endure during childbirth in our nation. There are two primary times when no doesn’t mean no: when a woman is being raped or when she is in labor. Had Rendon taken the time to talk with women who have experienced what is known as “birth rape” in some circles or tbose who have lost their babies, he would not have made such a flippant comment about the joy of childbirth, and the trauma around childbirth would likely have merited more than a few brief paragraphs in this work.

I will definitely recommend Upside to many clients, primarily the family members and friends of those enduring traumas around war, cancer, or accidents. I will also recommend it to individuals who, as Rendon notes in the text, have already come to the recognition on their own that their traumas can serve for positive growth. The book would serve well in a college classroom of psychology, medical, nursing or social work students trying to begin to understand trauma. However, for those who are dealing with childbirth trauma, rape, or abuse, Upside is not necessarily the best place to find information about healing.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC