Whole Again: Healing Your Heart and Rediscovering Your True Self After Toxic Relationships and Emotional Abuse

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Writing about a book also forces you to practice spaced repetition. Maybe you started reading a book a few days ago and writing a summary a few days later is a natural way to employ “spaced repetition” and reinforce the concepts. England, 1947. Ellie Montford is sent to boarding school by her cold and distant parents, joining her best friend’s family on their farm for the holidays. She forges a bond with her friend’s brother, Simon, who promises to marry her – but childhood promises may not last… It’s not your job to manage the emotions of others. It’s an exhausting role that may offer temporary bursts of self-worth, but ultimately will drain the life out of you. So that's why it constantly feels like a vise is squeezing my stomach and why I'm always jumping at loud noises or sudden movements! One of the few books I’ve read that digs into the fact that the trauma continues for years after the toxic person is out of your life. Sometimes for a lifetime. That PTSD is not just from being in an actual war but this personal war you were in. It talks about how that level of trauma changes you. I know that far too intimately.

Whole Again by Kerry Katona | Waterstones Kerry Katona: Whole Again by Kerry Katona | Waterstones

Buy this book even if you just think a connection you have is toxic. Buy it if it’s over and you are broken and feel so alone. Buy it for someone who can’t see what is really happening to them as often when we read things instead of being told it sinks in better. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, even if the trauma was a long time ago. Five stars! Additionally, revisiting great books is helpful because the problems you deal with change over time. Sure, when you read a book twice maybe you’ll catch some stuff you missed the first time around, but it’s more likely that new passages and ideas will be relevant to you. It’s only natural for different sentences to leap out at you depending on the point you are at in life. One way to imagine a book is like a knowledge tree with a few fundamental concepts forming the trunk and the details forming the branches. You can learn more and improve reading comprehension by “linking branches” and integrating your current book with other knowledge trees. One book will rarely change your life, even if it does deliver a lightbulb moment of insight. The key is to get a little wiser each day.Step 1: You start out joyful and whole, able to freely love (and receive love). This is how we all start out. Some people don’t ever recall feeling like this, and that’s okay. Step 5: A protective self takes over to disprove and distract from the pain. Its primary purpose is control and avoidance: to keep you numb and prevent the same pain from occurring again. Unable to generate joy from the true self, the protective self relies heavily upon external measures of worth to keep itself alive. It is “who you are”—how you view the world, even the lens through which you approach healing. (This is also called the False Self or the Ego.) There are many benefits to reading more books, but perhaps my favorite is this: A good book can give you a new way to interpret your past experiences. If you feel like you can’t squeeze the whole book into three sentences, consider using the Feynman Technique.

WHOLE Synonyms: 159 Similar and Opposite Words | Merriam WHOLE Synonyms: 159 Similar and Opposite Words | Merriam

It is, of course, silly for someone to think that they're worthless but also a master manipulator capable of fooling their close friends and colleagues, but it's not like emotions are subject to logic. Walking the reader through tools to use, how to identify your protective self, how to deconstructe that protective self, the author leads us to identifying and healing the core wound that has kept us tied to false beliefs about ourselves.

The main message of the book is that when we are wounded, our protective self seeks to distract and numb us from the pain, seeking external rewards to make us feel worthy. The way to healing is to get in touch with the body, with that tight feeling in your chest, with that sensation of numbness or dull flatness, and focus on that for a while, and let the bad feelings be felt and pass their time. That's the way that we will be able to release them and let go. He writes all day long in a room with lots of books and pictures on the wall from when he traveled around Asia. The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” – Carl Jung Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT, founder of A Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy® (PACT), and author of Wired for Loveand We Do: Saying Yes to a Relationship of Depth, True Connection, and Enduring Love