Healing Family Trauma

I Had A Brother Once is a brilliant, genre-defying work - both memoir and epic poem - about the struggle for wisdom, grace, and ritual in the face of unspeakable loss. Adam is forced to re-remember a brother he thought he knew and to reckon with a ghost, confronting his unsettled family history, his distant relationship with tradition and faith, and his desperate need to understand an event that always slides just out of his grasp.

Much of what we previously thought about trauma is simply wrong. It’s not a psychological problem as we previously thought. This book provides five concepts that will turn your previous understanding of trauma upside down and inside out, leading you to the breakthroughs you’ve been wanting.

When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change. A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be "managed", and Rachel had, at best, two years to live. Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive.

Life is hard. The lingering effects of past bullying, abuse, trauma, trouble, or chaos can negatively affect today’s relationships, today’s ability to make good decisions, and today’s ability to have joy. We may think we have put the past behind us, and yet the past seems to have trouble staying in the past. Often the feelings about the emotional wounds of the past drift into the present, making problems for today. It can give us feelings of stress, anxiety worry, anger, and feeling like bad things will happen.

Countless Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the enslavers who bought and sold their ancestors. Among them is Dionne Ford, whose great grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift. What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take? In this book, which move between her inner life and deep research, Ford tells us.