AMAZON About the Author Analie Shepherd Loving wife, mother and Nana ... Author, Artist, Actress, Choir and Play Director. I love to dance, sing and laugh ... with friends, or alone! I look for the "wine moments" of life and live them to the fullest.
Forward by the Ladies of Tell The Forward reveals that some therapists have little desire to believe they or their colleagues are capable of odious and destructive interactions with patients
TELL is the Therapy Exploitation Link Line , originated in 1980 by a small, 5, assemblage of women all of whom had been sufferers of manipulation by mental health professionals. ‘TELL responders function as sounding boards, reality checkers, and friends who guide victims in taking back their personal powers as they grow from victims to survivors.’ The Shattered Mirror A Journey of Recovery from Abusive Therapy
Part One: This is My Story Writer shepherd re-counts that at the age of three and five days old she and her siblings were parted from both of their parents. From their Father due to his drunken furies, from their Mother by her mother and siblings. The children were regularly told they were of bad blood and developed a resulting sense that they were themselves bad.
‘Children accept the way things are and do the best they can do. The best I could do was to somehow separate myself from the painful and heartbreaking reality.’ For the author that separation mechanism was to create Maggie, the author’s other mommy.
When the author was five she, her sister’s and their mother moved into a house where her school teacher mother spent little actual time. She taught school, ate dinner at her mother’s house, returned to her house later and had little repartee with the five little girls who were her children. During that time Meagan was ‘the other’ who came to stand in the gap between what for the author was authenticity and the intolerable.
In time, writer Shepherd was able to set aside The Others, marry and enjoy family with children of her own. It was a period she recalls as ‘The Beautiful Time.’ It was a time when old hurts were resolved, siblings and Shepherd’s Mother became steady visitors to her home. It was a time when they all evolved into a loving, caring family.
Discovering that her teenaged daughter has suffered recurrent rape at the hands of a member of the extended family brought the author’s new genuineness crashing to a close.
It was a time when the author first sought a therapist to help her deal with the guilt, murmurs from her past vis-à-vis how she was bad, and was to blame for introducing wickedness into the family. In therapist Julia, the author relates, she found the parent, the sanctuary, she had prayed for, for so long.
It was five years later the author sent a letter to Tell in which Ana related that she, at last, realized the verbal and emotional abuse she was enduring from the therapist and faced her problem. Ana adored Julia; but she finally wanted to face the fact of the abuse and break the hold the therapist held.
Part Two: August ~ January
The Day Everything Changed Life overwhelming moments seldom publicize themselves.
Enough is Enough —Maybe, Shepherd tells that Therapy had developed into ‘my own personal hell’
No Voice and No Reality ‘the feeling one cannot get enough love and comfort often come when the love and comfort being offered are full of mixed messages.’
The Others Shepherd admits ‘When I first found out about The Others within, I did not believe they really existed.’
Part Three: February ~ May
Easter Morning ‘For all the hard and sad times growing up, that morning is a lovely memory of goodness and giving, of love and kindness.’ Un believable Therapist X had made an indifferent comment which left the Author Shepherd with feelings of upset, irritation and incredulity.
The First Embrace ‘finding that place of deep comfort and love … became all consuming.’
Part Four: July ~ December
The Gift of Innocence Ana tells of her mother’s passing and her daughter’s nuptial.
The Gift of Forgiveness Ana mentions that her day had been quiet and nice. It is the Christmas holidays, family has visited and Ana felt a sweet connection with them that she has not felt in a while.
Part Five: January ~ June
The White House on a Hill The author relates, ‘That house became for me a refuge, a sanctuary, and home. … Even now, decades later, that house has the power, in just the remembrance of it, to still my soul.’
The Gift of Love Ana states, ‘I continue to have such complicated and confused feeling about what love means.’
Part Six: December ~ August was a time of ups and downs for Ana concerning her therapist.
Part Seven: Betrayal and Restoration Ana relates, ‘I was proud I had been able to stand up for myself.
Part Eight: A Conversation centers upon a poem written by Ana, ‘Hope creeps on silent feet, unheralded without expectation or need.
Part Nine: Bewilderment a sequence of therapists, and starting and stopping therapy concluded with Lisa, a therapist, who is not faultless and doesn’t claim to be.
Part Ten: A Final Journey Ana relates a poignant return to the White House on the hill and how it ends in the recognition that Ana is today tougher and more astute than she once was, and, the love she urgently sought from her mother she now finds today in her family of husband and children, in true friendships and from within herself.
The Beginning Ana clarifies how the many emails she and Laurie, her TELL responder, and a true friend, shared over the several years of Ana’s journey to robust emotional steadiness came to be the basis for THIS book.
I found Mending the Shattered Mirror to be a commanding, gripping work. Reading of Analie Shepherd’s particular journey from broken childhood, into the adult world, escorted by her group of ‘The Others’ is not just another multiple personality volume.
Readers are transported with Ana along her trek from a childhood measured by rather benign parental abandonment coupled with the rigid, incorrect, persistence of Ana’s grandmother and aunt, her mother’s sibling, concerning how and why Ana’s mother was unprepared to parent her children.
Notwithstanding; Analie survived the wretchedness and desolation of her childhood. She found pleasure, contentment and self-actualization in her marriage and family previous to making an appalling detection, and suffered a near overwhelming need for assistance, and treatment, to assist in her dealing with the sad truth of what her life had become.
Thus, began the four-year voyage during which time the truth of Analie’s exploitation at the hands of a counselor single-minded in her desire to mold Ana into the role the therapist needed, and not the role best for Analie concluded successfully. That victory came about in part to the role TELL responder Laurie provided as listener, reality coordinator, and most of all chum who gently directed the way as Ana began taking back her distinct authority, as Analie moved from battered, weak victim to sturdier, vigorous survivor.’
This book, The Shattered Mirror A Journey of Recovery from Abusive Therapy is an extension of the email connection Ana and Laurie developed.
I found the book to be highly comprehensible, although difficult to read at times simply because Ana’s anguish comes across so tangibly raw, tangible and intense.
I am happy to recommend The Shattered Mirror A Journey of Recovery from Abusive Therapy lay persons and therapists alike. This book may serve to help another mishandled patient understand that the therapist chosen may not be the best to help her/his healing.
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Reviewed by Molly Reviews BOOKS molly martin ===========================================
AMAZON Product details
Paperback: 296 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (September 22, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1539105997
ISBN-13: 978-1539105992
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
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