Stunning, Compassionate Blueprint to Help with Early Trauma

I am simply stunned by this book. I like to read in general, and I really love to read good nonfiction. Unfortunately, it feels like it’s harder and harder to find good nonfiction these days. With the ease of self-publishing, many would-be authors seemingly throw up any old thing online for immediate public display and hopeful purchase.

This book is what nonfiction ought to be. This author has written about a very personal and difficult topic, childhood trauma, which she has experienced herself, unfortunately. She also holds an advanced degree, which I imagine taught her good research skills, so she can bolster her own insights and experiences with science. What she has done here is put together the perfect blueprint for someone to heal from childhood trauma. The first chapters describe the symptoms and effects of it. The next chapters are a kind of “where are you now” section, explaining why it’s hard to understand healthy relationships if you suffered this way, why self-care may falter, and the monsters that still lurk even after time has passed. Then, she goes into how to dismantle and get past these traumas. But most remarkable, I think, are the sections on how to build a better now.

This book is meant to give you the baby steps to freedom from the effects of childhood trauma so you can embrace a better life. One might fear that an author with her credentials could be cold and clinical, but this book is far from that. While she has studied the subject in some depth, you can tell this is intensely personal for her. She not only openly shares her own trauma; she gives the impression that she truly cares that you heal and move on. Her compassion, as well as her insights, comes across on every single page. It has to be one of the most beautifully written self-help books that I’ve read. This book is not just for people who suffered sustained childhood trauma but also those who had the odd incident or two that may still affect them today. If you are a person has this in your past, no matter the extent, I highly recommend picking up this book and letting this author gently guide you through the difficulties that are still affecting you to a better place.

Book Lacks Needed Resources

The author states that if you follow her 6-week course of action as detailed in the book, you will come to a better place in your relationship with food. The author has a clear understanding of what motivates a too emotional connection to food. She states that her program will help break these emotional bonds and help you create a more normal approach to food. For each week, the chapter is divided into two sections, one section dealing with eating and the other with thoughts and emotions. Each chapter ends with an exercise that is supposed to help get more in touch with ourselves and our bodies. Supposedly, this book was taken from a 6-week course that the author has done live. I felt like most of the chapters were too short. For all the promises made in the first chapters, I didn’t really see how what she promised could be delivered by what was actually contained in the chapters. I haven’t had the time to actually work through all these chapters to actually say if they are efficacious or not. I do like that the author does try to impart that we need to be kind and forgive ourselves. We do tend to beat ourselves up in our relationship with food, only seeing our failings.

I did receive an ARC of this book. The link to the Table of Contents brings me to a blank page. I hope that has been remedied in the book offered for sale. I found another issue as well. The book does have links to her website for the meditations in the book; I am always glad when books with meditations do that. Unfortunately, I believe she recently had a server move or upgrade. I actually had to do a search on the first week’s meditation to find it as I was brought to a File Not Found 404 page when I tried to follow the link given in chapter one. Here’s the link to the currently available meditations for this book: https://www.theliferaft.org/lfly-resources-download. Unfortunately, not all of them are uploaded; except for the intro one, the text for the rest of meditations was not given within the book itself (so there is no way you can do them yourself without downloading them from the website). There’s a brief bring-to-body-awareness meditation mentioned in one of the earliest chapters before the 6-week adventure begins that is not at the website at all; the last three meditations are missing from the website, too. On the page that does contain the available meditations, she states that they are still in the process of moving things over so not everything is there. I run a website or five myself, and it would seem that it would take longer to type that excuse than to actually upload and link the meditations, but maybe that’s just me!

As four of the main seven meditations are actually missing at the website (and three of these four not actually given in the book), I feel like I can’t give this book a good review until these problems are remedied.

If the book had correct links so the meditations could actually be done (or even had all the meditation within the book itself), I would give this book 4 stars. As the book isn’t actually functional without the links, I have given it a one-star review.