I Thought We'd Never Speak Again
The Road from Estrangement to Reconciliation
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In her classic books The Courage to Heal and Allies in Healing, Laura Davis helped millions cope with the trauma of child sexual abuse. Her supportive guide Becoming the Parent You Want to Be taught parents to create a vision for their families. Now, in I Thought We'd Never Speak Again, she tackles another critical, emerging issue: reconciling relationships sundered by betrayal, anger, and misunderstanding.
With her trademark clarity and compassion, Davis maps the reconciliation process through gripping firstperson stories of people who have reconciled under a wide variety of difficult circumstances. In these pages, parents reconcile with children, embittered siblings reconnect, estranged friends reunite, and war veterans and crime victims meet with their enemies. Davis weaves these powerful accounts with her own experiences reconciling with her mother after a long, painful estrangement.
Making a crucial distinction between reconciliation and forgiveness, Davis explains how people can make peace in relationships without necessarily forgiving past hurts. Step by step, she clarifies the qualities needed for reconciliation-including maturity, discernment, determination, courage, communication, and compassion. To help readers gauge their own readiness, she includes a self-assessment entitled "Are You Ready for Reconciliation?" as well as a special section called "Ideas for Reflection and Discussion."
On each page of this inspiring and instructive book, Laura Davis offers hope and help for reconciliation between individuals, and in the larger human family, sharing essential keys for resolving troubled relationships and finding peace.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Families, partnerships and friendships can break up over what appear to be surmountable conflicts, and efforts at damage control are often unproductive. Davis (coauthor, The Courage to Heal), a counselor to survivors of childhood sexual abuse, does an excellent job of mapping out an effective reconciliation process. She explains how to rationally assess the possibility of success, recognize the value of partial reconciliation and establish the rules of engagement. Throughout the book are riveting first-person stories by a neglectful mother who made amends with her grown children, a man who organized a reconciliation workshop between children of Holocaust victims and children of Nazis, and many others that illustrate how compassion, honesty and the ability to listen are indispensable. Davis's book is most useful as a guide to reconciliation with intimates; when she extends the scope to include restorative justice initiatives, the issues become somewhat muddied. The needs of violent crime victims and offenders in mediation programs, for example, don't seem exactly the same as those of feuding families and friends. Without a discussion of those differences, the concepts of reconciliation and forgiveness can be confused with empowerment and revenge. In addition, for crime victims and discrimination victims, the social pressure to "get over it" can be fierce, something Davis touches on only briefly. Nonetheless, her insight, clear writing and especially the extensive personal anecdotes should be helpful to readers struggling with these issues.
