A well-structured, encouraging book for anyone troubled by domestic violence.
A licensed mental health counselor explodes myths and offers practical advice regarding abusive relationships.
Debut author Streyffeler has a private counseling practice in Fort Myers, Florida, and has been providing therapy for 25 years. In a preface, she recalls persuading an upper-middle-class client that her husband’s behavior was indeed domestic violence: “That’s not possible!” the woman replied; she assumed that abused wives “live in trailer parks and their husbands wear ‘wifebeater shirts.’ ” Starting with this stereotype, Streyffeler systematically counters many common misconceptions about domestic violence: “Abuse is a pattern of behavior. It is not an isolated incident or event. It does not have to be physical.” Emotional and psychological violence are just as damaging, she argues. Abuse often coexists with drug and alcohol problems or mental health issues, and Streyffeler points out that abusive partners may also destroy property or use sex in a manipulative way. Much of the book is devoted to short case studies, based on fictionalized composites of Streyffeler’s clients, and the characters generally have alliterative names to make them memorable. For instance, Ishmael allows Isabel to quit work once she gets pregnant—a calculating move to cut her off from her friends. Charlie tells Charlene that if she leaves him, he’ll tell their son that “Mommy is breaking up the family.” Often, abusive situations are simply a matter of power and control, the author explains. She offers a variety of examples to ensure that many readers will find something that speaks to their own experience, and a thorough list of reasons why people stay in abusive relationships will enlighten concerned loved ones. A chapter on safety planning is particularly valuable; in it, she urges readers to keep a bag packed with important documents in case they need to leave quickly. The author ends with her own story of starting over after leaving an abusive husband—a personal stake that anchors this information-heavy work.
A well-structured, encouraging book for anyone troubled by domestic violence.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8823-8
Page Count: 133
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.
An analysis of our emotions and the skills required to understand them.
We all have emotions, but how many of us have the vocabulary to accurately describe our experiences or to understand how our emotions affect the way we act? In this guide to help readers with their emotions, Brackett, the founding director of Yale University’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, presents a five-step method he calls R.U.L.E.R.: We need to recognize our emotions, understand what has caused them, be able to label them with precise terms and descriptions, know how to safely and effectively express them, and be able to regulate them in productive ways. The author walks readers through each step and provides an intriguing tool to use to help identify a specific emotion. Brackett introduces a four-square grid called a Mood Meter, which allows one to define where an emotion falls based on pleasantness and energy. He also uses four colors for each quadrant: yellow for high pleasantness and high energy, red for low pleasantness and high energy, green for high pleasantness and low energy, and blue for low pleasantness and low energy. The idea is to identify where an emotion lies in this grid in order to put the R.U.L.E.R. method to good use. The author’s research is wide-ranging, and his interweaving of his personal story with the data helps make the book less academic and more accessible to general readers. It’s particularly useful for parents and teachers who want to help children learn to handle difficult emotions so that they can thrive rather than be overwhelmed by them. The author’s system will also find use in the workplace. “Emotions are the most powerful force inside the workplace—as they are in every human endeavor,” writes Brackett. “They influence everything from leadership effectiveness to building and maintaining complex relationships, from innovation to customer relations.”
An intriguing approach to identifying and relating to one’s emotions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-21284-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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