Family Healing

At the center of people’s lives is the family, which can be and should be a haven from the harshness of the outside world. Unfortunately, the source of people’s greatest hope for happiness often turns out to be the source of their worst disappointments. Now, the family therapist, Salvador Minuchin unravels the knots of family dynamics against the background of his own odyssey from an extended Argentinian Jewish family to his innovative treatment of troubled families. Through the stories of families who have sought his help, the reader is taken inside the consulting room to see how families struggle with self-defeating patterns of behavior. Through his confrontational style of therapy, Dr Minuchin demonstrates the strict but unseen rules that trap family members in stifling roles, and illuminates methods for helping families untangle systems of disharmony. In Dr Minuchin’s therapy there are no villains and no victims, only people trying to deal with various problems at each stage of the family life cycle. Minuchin understands the family as a system of interconnected lives, not as a “dysfunctional” group. Each story of a therapeutic encounter brings a new understanding of familiar dilemmas and classic mistakes, and recounts Dr Minuchin’s creative solutions.

In this sensational and highly original book Dr Kenneth McAll tells how through his medical and religious experiences he has discovered a remarkable new method of healing. He believes that many supposedly 'incurable' patients are the victims of ancestral control. He therefore seeks to liberate them from this control. By drawing up a family tree he can identify the ancestor who is causing his patient harm. He then cuts the bond between the ancestor and the patient by celebrating, with a clergyman, a service of Holy Communion in which he delivers the tormented ancestor to God. His book could revolutionize the spiritual, medical and psychiatric approach to many forms of mental and physical sickness. It will undoubtedly create great controversy among the medical and clerical professions. Russ Parker, director of the Christian Acorn Healing Foundation, 'is honoured' to be asked to write a new foreword for the SPCK Classics edition

A practical guide to connecting with your ancestors for personal, family, and cultural healing • Provides exercises and rituals to help you initiate contact with your ancestors, find ancestral guides, and assist the dead who are not yet at peace • Explains how to safely engage in lineage repair work by connecting with your more ancient ancestors before relating with the recently deceased • Explores how your ancestors can help you transform intergenerational legacies of pain and abuse and reclaim the positive spirit of the family Everyone has loving and wise ancestors they can learn to invoke for support and healing. Coming into relationship with your ancestors empowers you to transform negative family patterns into blessings and encourages good health, self-esteem, clarity of purpose, and better relationships with your living relatives. Offering a practical guide to understanding and navigating relationships with the spirits of those who have passed, Daniel Foor, Ph.D., details how to relate safely and effectively with your ancestors for personal, family, and cultural healing. He provides exercises and rituals, grounded in ancient wisdom traditions, to help you initiate contact with your ancestors, find supportive ancestral guides, cultivate forgiveness and gratitude, harmonize your bloodlines, and assist the dead who are not yet at peace. He explains how to safely engage in lineage repair work by connecting with your more ancient ancestors before relating with the recently deceased. He shows how, by working with spiritually vibrant ancestors, individuals and families can understand and transform intergenerational patterns of pain and abuse and reclaim the full blessings and gifts of their bloodlines. Ancestral repair work can also catalyze healing breakthroughs among living family members and help children and future generations to live free from ancestral burdens. The author provides detailed instructions for ways to honor the ancestors of a place, address dream visits from the dead, and work with ancestor shrines and altars. The author offers guidance on preparing for death, funeral rites, handling the body after death, and joining the ancestors. He also explains how ancestor work can help us to transform problems such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious persecution. By learning the fundamentals of ancestor reverence and ritual, you will discover how to draw on the wisdom of supportive ancestral guides, heal family troubles, maintain connections with beloved family after their death, and better understand the complex and interconnected relationship between the living and the dead.

This fascinating book by Rebecca Linder Hintze powerfully and effectively communicates a key, and sometimes overlooked, piece of the puzzle relating to family dynamics. For example, have you ever wondered why some families reach a ceiling on their earning potential, struggle to have happy marriages, or have such difficult interactions with their siblings and parents? Perhaps your family has a history of sabotaging careers or thwarting their love relationships? Healing Your Family History explains that most of our individual issues originate from family blocks. As you read this book, you’ll come to understand how family belief systems store inside you and prevent individual growth by locking you into thought processes that hold you back. All families have these nonverbal belief systems, and unless you understand and heal your inherent blocks, it may be difficult to love others, move forward, and get what you want in life. Most people have a family . . . and we all have a reason to heal our related challenges—after all, tribal issues sit at the core of world turmoil. Those who are truly ready to heal their family dysfunction will benefit immensely from this book!

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by unstable moods, negative self-image, dangerous impulsivity, and tumultuous relationships. Many people with BPD excel in academics and careers while revealing erratic, self-destructive, and sometimes violent behavior only to those with whom they are intimate. Others have trouble simply holding down a job or staying in school. Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder is a compassionate and informative guide to understanding this profoundly unsettling--and widely misunderstood--mental illness, believed to affect approximately 6% of the general population. Rather than viewing people with BPD as manipulative opponents in a bitter struggle, or pitying them as emotional invalids, Valerie Porr cites cutting-edge science to show that BPD is a true neurobiological disorder and not, as many come to believe, a character flaw or the result of bad parenting. Porr then clearly and accessibly explains what BPD is, which therapies have proven effective, and how to rise above the weighty stigma associated with the disorder. Offering families and loved ones supportive guidance that both acknowledges the difficulties they face and shows how they can be overcome, Porr teaches empirically-supported and effective coping behaviors and interpersonal skills, such as new ways of talking about emotions, how to be aware of nonverbal communication, and validating difficult experiences. These skills are derived from Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Mentalization-based Therapy, two evidence-based treatments that have proven highly successful in reducing family conflict while increasing trust. Overcoming Borderline Personality Disorder is an empowering and hopeful resource for those who wish to gain better understanding of the BPD experience--and to make use of these insights in day-to-day family interactions. Winner of the ABCT Self Help Book Seal of Merit Award 2011

Every family is hurting, and the wounds that come from our relatives can be deeper than all others. Conflict within a family can range from daily frictions and annoyances to rage and hatred and eventually estrangement. We want things to be different but have no idea where to start. After 25 years of ministering to families, Rob Rienow believes reconciliation is at the heart of the gospel--reconciliation with God and one another. You will come away with specific steps you can take in your relationships with your family members to pursue peace and healing in your homes. Each chapter includes key biblical examples as well as present-day stories of families who have experienced God's help and healing--including the author's own miraculous healing of his relationship with his father. Our families can bring out the best, as well as the worst, in all of us. May this book guide you in making your home and family a blessing in a broken world.

A holistic method for resolving individual and intergenerational trauma • Explains how the author came to develop her system by integrating ancestral tribal wisdom with a fusion of two Western healing systems: Somatic Experiencing and Systemic Family Constellations Therapy • Shares stories from her healing work around the world, showing how this system can help resolve PTSD, depression, sexual trauma, addiction, and chronic illness • Presents action steps that readers can take immediately to engage the personal healing process The journey to healing trauma is not always straightforward. As Euphrasia “Efu” Nyaki reveals in detail, the healing process is a complex ritual of energy movement on the physical, emotional, and spiritual levels. Born and raised on Mount Kilimanjaro’s slopes in Tanzania, East Africa, Efu explains how she came to develop her profoundly successful system for helping people heal trauma by integrating ancestral tribal wisdom with a fusion of two Western healing systems: Somatic Experiencing and Systemic Family Constellations Therapy. She shares how her journey to become a healer was initiated by her Grandfather, who told her the legend of the sacred healing snail of the Nyaki clan. She explains how she discovered Somatic Experiencing and Systemic Family Constellations Therapy, and how combining these therapies created a powerful system for releasing cellular memories and healing the intergenerational and collective traumas hidden beneath the surface of suffering. Sharing stories from her healing work around the world, she presents action steps, such as meditations, breathwork, or creating a family tree, that readers can take immediately to regulate their nervous systems, deepen their awareness, and engage the personal healing process. Demonstrating how trauma survivors can transform their suffering into vibrant wholeness, the author shows how healing trauma is the result of bringing the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects of our lives into an integrated coherence.