Every Family Has a Story
How We Inherit Love and Loss
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Why do some families thrive in adversity while others fragment? How can families weather difficult transitions together? Why do our families so often exasperate us? And how can even small changes greatly improve our relationships?
In Every Family Has a Story, bestselling psychotherapist Julia Samuel turns from her acclaimed work with individuals to draw on her sessions with a wide variety of families, across multiple generations. Through eight beautifully told and insightful case studies, she analyzes a range of common issues, from loss to leaving home, and from separation to step-relationships, and shows how much is, in fact, inherited—and how much can be healed when it is faced together. Exploring the relationships that both touch us most and hurt us most, including the often under-appreciated impact of grandparents and siblings, and incorporating the latest academic research, she offers wisdom that is applicable to us all. Her twelve touchstones for family well-being—from fighting productively to making time for rituals—provide us with the tools to improve our relationships, and to create the families we wish for. This is a moving and reassuring meditation that, amid trauma and hardship, tells unforgettable stories of forgiveness, hope and love.
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.
