Reviews

Your turn for care: Surviving the aging and death of the adults who harmed you by Laura S. Brown

courtneyfalling's review

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

3.5

Wow, this book was emotional and impactful to read. I think the individual examples were necessary but certainly hard. Like I had to be very kind to myself while reading. 

Most useful parts:

• Developing self-compassion and healthy boundaries to avoid re-traumatization
• Questions to guide involvement more complicated than simply "do I want to be involved at all or not"
• Reassurance about not being alone in this experience 

Most frustrating parts:

• I really don’t like how much this demonizes people with personality disorders and looks to externally diagnosing them as such. Lots of folks, including lots of adult abuse survivors, have been labeled with personality disorders and still strive to be fundamentally good and supportive decision-makers. There are good and bad and morally complicated individuals with personality disorders and it's incredibly harmful and saneist to chalk harm up to having a personality disorder. 
• Most people in the current world are emotionally upset and dysregulated and exhausted. And looking to individual biological reasons why people are pathological and harm children ignores the more transformative justice view that child abuse is actually wildly normalized right now and a bigger social systemic problem. 
• Please don’t demonize those who attempt suicide! Including a lot of childhood abuse survivors! It is not selfish or vengeful! Wow this is bad!

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Grief, Incest, Mental illness, Physical abuse, Rape, and Suicide

Moderate: Abandonment, Addiction, Alcoholism, and Dementia