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Page 1 of 2 Kim Chernin, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother: Seven Stages of Change in Women's Lives (New York: Viking, 1998)
Kim Chernin tells the stories of women who have redefined their relationships with their mothers. Some of the stories are very striking; Chernin believes that women must first get past their longing for their mother, but then many of these women go back from their new position of strength and transform some pretty dysfunctional relationships. Chernin wants to present stories, not theory, and I found the book a bit scattered because she does not give her theoretical ideas a central organizing role. But the stories will stay with me.
Susan Forward and Craig Buck, Betrayal of Innocence: Incest and Its Devastation (New York: Penguin, 1988, first published by J. P. Tarcher, Inc., in 1978).
This is a reasonable book, and does include chapters on mother-son and mother-daughter incest, as well as the more common combinations. The author is a big fan of psychodrama, and her examples of how it can be used in the healing process are interesting. I also liked her anthropological discussion of incest. However, the book seems dated in its emphasis on the symptoms shown by survivors (particularly problems in relationships), not on the healing process. The author still assumes that multiple personalities are rare. Susan Forward was apparently Nichole Simpson's therapist. (I got this information from the internet).
Jennifer J. Freyd, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996).
This book is written for professionals, but it has a respectful rather than an objective tone (and Jennifer Freyd is a survivor herself, though she does not tell her story). She argues that the more the child depends on the abuser for survival (for example, if the abuser is a parent), the more likely that the child will not remember the abuse. This book really helped me understand the feelings of betrayal involved in abuse by someone who I trusted and depended on.
John Friel and Linda Friel, An Adult Child's Guide to What's "Normal" (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1990).
I expected this book to give more specific advice than it does--somehow I think I expected it to tell me how to make conversation at a cocktail party. But it is a good summary of basic advice about how to build a functional family if all you have known is a disfunctional one. Now that I am looking at it I want to read it again--there is so much there about how to avoid destructive patterns. If you don't like reading endless self-help books about codependency, boundaries, anger, etc., it is all here in brief but convincing form.
Maxine Harris, The Loss That Is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father (New York: Plume Books, 1996, first published by Dutton, 1995).
I felt initially that this book made too much of the impact of the loss of a parent, but she convinced me that I have not taken seriously enough the loss of my father. This not quite a self-help book, but an attempt by a therapist to categorize the different ways in which children can react to the death of a parent and how that loss affects them as they grow up She uses stories from interviews to illustrate all her points. Quite a hopeful book, showing the very different ways in which people can find meaning and hope.
Alice Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth (New York: Dutton, 1991).
I gather this book is Alice Miller's clearest statement of her view that healing repressed childhood abuse is the most important task of therapy, but I didn't like it as much as Thou Shalt Not Be Aware. She is clearly frustrated by the resistance of psychoanalysts to her previous books on the importance of child abuse.
Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).
This book is organized around an argument against the Freudian Drive Theory, but I found it very helpful because the point she wants to make is that actual childhood abuse is the most important thing. She emphasizes that anger at parents is ok and in fact healing, and criticizes those who would minimize it. Miller believes that abuse is often not remembered or misremembered, but she believes that inaccurate memories always hide memories of something worse.
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