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A review by charlotekerstenauthor
Healing from Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse by Shannon Thomas
There are some extremely broad and ubsubstantiated claims about personality disorders in this book. I fundamentally disagree that every abuser has a personality disorder and I think there isn't sufficient research to say that personality disorders are caused by environmental influences alone, ignoring genetic and other biological contributions.
There is one bizarre section that I had to re-read several times, where she states that sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists are people who experienced insecure attachments in childhood and decided to respond to that by becoming controlling, ruthless and selfish. It's one thing to say that some people choose to be bad people- sure, I can roll with that- but it's another thing entirely to state that a clinical personality disorder is essentially just boiled down to someone's decision to be a bad person.
The rest of the book that's actually focused on recovery from abuse is helpful and interesting but I just can't get past how much bad psychology there was in the first section.
There is one bizarre section that I had to re-read several times, where she states that sociopaths, psychopaths and narcissists are people who experienced insecure attachments in childhood and decided to respond to that by becoming controlling, ruthless and selfish. It's one thing to say that some people choose to be bad people- sure, I can roll with that- but it's another thing entirely to state that a clinical personality disorder is essentially just boiled down to someone's decision to be a bad person.
The rest of the book that's actually focused on recovery from abuse is helpful and interesting but I just can't get past how much bad psychology there was in the first section.