Every Family Has A Story
How we inherit love and loss
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- €0.99
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Publisher Description
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'Essential, clever and kind' Alain de Botton
'I am a huge admirer of Julia's work' Elizabeth Day
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In her bestselling follow-up to Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass, much-loved psychotherapist Julia Samuel invites us into her sessions as she explores the relationships that have the power to touch us and hurt us most: those with our family.
Through eight beautifully told case studies, covering a variety of families across multiple generations, she analyses common issues from losing a parent to children leaving home, and from separation to step-relationships. In doing so she shows how much is, in fact, inherited -- and how much can be healed when it is faced together.
Every Family Has A Story provides the tools that will help with this work of improving our relationships. Its twelve touchstones for family well-being show how to communicate effectively, set boundaries, fight productively and allow change.
This is a wise and insightful exploration of modern life that will help us create the families we wish for.
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'Julia Samuel writes with unfailing grace, tenderness and consummate storytelling. Everyone who reads this will learn something profound' Rachel Clarke
'Julia Samuel offers vivid insights in a book for all families... I was utterly drawn in' Kathryn Mannix
'Fascinating... Julia Samuel's compassionate work never fails to inform, comfort and make me think' Pandora Sykes
'A wise and important book, full of insight into the pain and beauty at the heart of family life... I loved it' Clover Stroud
'Julia Samuel is so wise and compassionate. I love every word she writes' Cathy Rentzenbrink
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Here, award-winning psychotherapist Julia Samuel presents her 12 “touchstones for family wellbeing”—which she feels are essential as family is, almost always, the most important relationship in our lives. With writing that’s at times both profound and nicely self-deprecating, Samuel dives into a whole host of familial issues most of us will have faced at some point—loss, step- and half- relationships, separation, trauma and much more—and walks us through a whole host of tangible strategies for handling them more effectively. This is a powerful—and often quite gorgeous—look into how we reshape our families into something more supportive to everyone in your unit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these astute case studies, psychotherapist Samuel (This Too Shall Pass) investigates the complex emotions that family can inspire. She tells the stories of "eight families as they face a particular challenge, charting them through multiple generations" with a focus on the legacy of trauma. The client studies include a gay couple from different cultural backgrounds navigating the adoption process, a family dealing with the aftermath of a child's death, five generations of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family grappling with their matriarch's escape from the Holocaust, and a father coming to terms with his impending death from cancer. The author excels at distilling shrewd insights from her subjects, such as when she notes that the manner in which one tells a story can offer catharsis, and recounts how she helped three sisters make sense of their father's suicide by constructing a narrative that accounted for his PTSD and the stigma around mental illness. Samuel's candor offers an unusually intimate look at how therapists work, as when she admits that she rushed an adult client who was not ready to process the news that the man who raised him was not his biological father. Covering a broad array of family structures and dilemmas, this quietly dazzling consideration of what it means to be a family is sure to resonate.
