Healing From Family Rifts: Ten Steps to Finding Peace After Being Cut Off From a Family Member - Softcover

Sichel, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071412425 ISBN 13: 9780071412421

Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Ten steps to surviving a family rift, finding peace, and moving on A family rift is one of the most traumatic experiences a person can face. It can have a profound effect on virtually every aspect of life, causing depression, relationship problems, and even physical illness. Healing From Family Rifts offers hope to those coping with a split in their families. Family therapist Mark Sichel addresses the pain and shame connected with family rifts and offers a way through the crisis and on toward healing and fulfillment. Uniquely, Sichel does not assume that every rift will or even should be mended. Instead, he offers ways to recover from any outcome, including: A 10-step process to come to terms with the family dynamics that led to the split Methods to find peace and personal reconciliation Skills that help to build a second family of people whose values are in line with one's own Techniques to fight feelings of guilt when faced with a family rift Includes inspiring and instructive stories drawn from the author's patients that help readers put their own situations in perspective.

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<p><b>Make peace with yourself and reclaim your life with Mark Sichel's powerful ten-step healing program</b></p><p>"<u>That's it. I've had it. I never want to see or hear from you again</u>." Those words may have caused great anguish, or great relief, at the moment they were spoken--depending on whether you were the giver or the receiver of the powerful punch. But now you're left with the nagging despair of losing a family member. The pain can be overwhelming, but there is a way out. Through the help of <u>Healing from Family Rifts</u>,<i> </i>you can find peace again and recover from the<i> </i>isolation of family exile.</p><p>Author and licensed clinical social worker Mark Sichel knows what it's like to suffer a family exile: his parents cut off all communication with him years ago. Now he's applying the steps used during his own recovery to help you overcome the heartbreak of your family rift. Through his powerful and proven ten-step program, along with the stories of other embattled survivors of family wars, you will achieve real, permanent, inner reconciliation, regardless of the cause of the rift--whether divorce, marriage outside your race or religion, emotional abuse, objections to sexual orientation, addictions, or any other reason.</p><p>From dealing with the shock of the rift to building your second-chance family, from recognizing the signs of acute stress disorder to learning from successful families, Mark Sichel's ten steps to healing will help you achieve serenity and contentment by learning how to make peace with yourself first<i>.</i></p><p><b>Review from <i>Library Journal</i></b></p><p>[This] self-help manual for adults seeking to better their family relationships emphasizes that readers can change only themselves and their own reactions-not the actions of others. A therapist and licensed clinical social worker, Sichel concentrates on relationships where one family member refuses contact with another, not limiting his discussion to parent-child rifts. Among other strategies, his ten steps lead readers to deal with their own trauma, learn to love themselves, understand family myths and roles, build supportive relationships with others (their "second-chance family"), and try to heal the break if possible. Drawing on stories from Sichel's patients and from personal experience (his father broke with him twice), this book is sure to be read eagerly by those in difficult family situations. -Kay Brodie, Chesapeake Coll., Wye Mills, MD Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.</p> <p><b>Review from <i>The Chicago Tribune</i></b></p><p>"The empathetic Sichel, a clinical social worker, stresses that those cut off have the right to be happy and at peace....Perhaps what Sichel does best is encourage readers to make meaning out of life's experiences, whatever comes our way."</p><p><b>Mark Sichel </b>is a licensed clinical social worker who counsels individuals, couples, and families in New York City. He is the founder and editor of the award-winning website, www.psybersquare.com, has counseled hundreds of clients who have suffered family cutoffs, and has made it through his own family rift as well.</p>

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Healing from Family Rifts

Ten Steps to Finding Peace After Being Cut Off from a Family Member

By Mark Sichel

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2004 Mark Sichel
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-141242-1

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Acknowledge and Deal with the Shock
2 Start to Live, Laugh, and Be Happy Now: Taking Back Your Life
3 Discover Your Family Roles
4 Understand Your Family Myths
5 Learn from Successful Families
6 Let Go of Resentment
7 Make the First Move: Learn and Employ Active Measures to Reconcile with 
Your Family
8 Build Your Second-Chance Family
9 Cultivate Gratitude and Emotional Generosity
10 Make Meaning out of Your Experience
Index

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Acknowledge and Deal with the Shock

Whether you've been cut off by your family, or you've cut off a family memberbecause of circumstances you find intolerable, you invariably undergo atraumatic shock. Certainly my father's wholesale rejection of me shook me to mycore—a trauma I've since learned had a number of stages I had first toacknowledge, and then to navigate. How I've managed to weather and overcome theworst of this trauma—and how my patients have similarly learned to prevailover what is often an initial indescribable agony of a family rift—offerthe substance of this first chapter, which describes the first step in healing.

A good deal of the shock for me came from the unnerving realization that myusual reliable approach to dealing with crisis—thinking my way through it,and reaching a sense of how to cope with it—just wasn't working here. Ideveloped symptoms of dysfunction that were uncharacteristic of me—I feltunanchored, cheated, disgusted, full of shame, self-doubt, sadness, guilt, andfear—toxic emotions that engendered a terrible sense of confusion andpowerlessness. Soon I was able to see that most of these symptoms signaled acutestress disorder, a diagnosis that ultimately suggested ways I could begin toheal.

Fortunately, one certainty born of my clinical experience and the lessons ofhaving dealt with other difficult situations in my life hadn't deserted me. Iknew that the initial level of toxic intensity and functional impairment I feltwould eventually pass. It always does when you do the right things for yourself.

Understanding the Trauma Is of Human Design

The first "right thing" was simply this: I needed to remind myself not totrivialize or attempt to minimize the effects of what I was goingthrough—I had instead to give it its full due. Family estrangement on somelevel seemed "logically" to be less catastrophic than some of the terriblethings going on in the world such as terrorist attacks, violent crime, naturaldisasters such as fire or earthquakes, or the actual physical death of a lovedone. However, it had a magnitude for me that, at least for the moment, farexceeded these catastrophes. I needed to accept this—and to be careful notto add to an already festering sense of shame and guilt (flip sides of my rageand hurt) that I was somehow "over-reacting"—that "it could be worse."Hypothetically, of course, there's always something that "could be worse," butthe impact of my father severing contact with me had, especially in the freshwake of the cutoff, subjected me to the worst emotional trauma I could rememberever undergoing. I couldn't underestimate the impact of this trauma—orchastise myself for overreacting. This wasn't the time to judge myfeelings—to attempt artificially to gloss over the pain. This wasn't thetime to blame myself for the sudden incapacities the trauma caused in my life.This was the time to let myself feel it, all of it—and acknowledge it.

Part of acknowledging it meant understanding that the trauma was so greatbecause it had been caused by human beings—it hadn't come from chance, oran act of God—it had come through human choice. All traumas are moremagnified and psychologically upsetting when human beings rather than naturecause them. Losing your home to a fire will certainly be traumatic, but losingit because arsonists caused the fire will almost always make the effects of theshock more severe. Similarly, the trauma of a family member physically dyingusually becomes less painful with time—it falls under the heading of anatural catastrophe from which the human psyche ultimately learns to heal.However, on two decades of evidence of the scores of my patients who've facedboth kinds of trauma, the psychological "death" of a family cutoff clearly tendsto remain torturous—and very much more emotionally damaging. Obviouslyfamily cutoffs are not the only devastating traumas we commonly face. Divorce,for example, can be every bit as disruptive. But unlike most family cutoffs,divorce has at least some social acceptance: it is talked about much morereadily than other cutoffs in the family tend to be.

This suggests what compounds the problem: the terrible secrecy that usuallyattends family cutoffs—and the related fact that there is very littleformal help offered to people who've undergone them. Many family members feelself-imposed pressure to go on as if their lives were still normal; thus,avenues for healing and recovery become even more elusive. After all, thistrauma isn't only of human design—it's the design of members of your ownfamily: the very people you thought loved you most in the world. That isn'tsomething you're likely to broadcast—or even tell most of your bestfriends in private.

However, you need to talk right now, and to recognize that the task of healingfrom your family rift will take a much greater effort than you probably haveever previously brought to emotional distress in your life. With the rightattitude of self-compassion, and by employing tactics you will learn in thisbook, it is fortunately an effort immeasurably worth taking.

You Don't Have to Fix or Resolve Anything Today

It's normal to want closure after something as terrible as a familyrift—indeed, our impulse may be to do anything possible to make the paingo away, whether it involves abject and inappropriate apologies (amounting togroveling to keep the peace) or resorting to drugs or alcohol to help you escapethe pain. However, a necessary corollary to understanding that you're dealingwith trauma of a completely different order than you have probably faced beforeis understanding that this healing is going to take time. There are no quickfixes here: there couldn't be, given our natural human aversion to ambiguity anduncertainty coupled with what are generally the lifelong roots of dysfunctionthat led to your family rift in the first place. In short, now's the time togive yourself permission to go slow. You don't have to fix or resolve anythingtoday.

This means having compassion for yourself—and especially for the impetusthat makes you crave quick closure: the inability to tolerate mixed feelings oflove, hate, longing, rage, sadness, and vengeance. A family cutoff is initiallya phenomenally confusing time for all concerned; this degree of uncertainty isnot easy for anyone. However, I can tell you from years of practicingpsychotherapy that, as...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0071412425
• ISBN 13: 9780071412421
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland