Healing From Family Rifts

Helps recover from the isolation of family exile. This book offers ten steps to healing that helps you achieve serenity and contentment by learning how to make peace with yourself first.

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Make peace with yourself and reclaim your life with Mark Sichel's powerful ten-step healing program. 'That's it. I've had it. I never want to see or hear from you again'. 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 "Healing from Family Rifts", you can find peace again and recover from the isolation of family exile. 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. 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.Review from "Library Journal" - [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.Review from "The Chicago Tribune" - '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'. Mark Sichel is a licensed clinical social worker who counsels individuals, couples, and families in New York City. He has counseled hundreds of clients who have suffered family cutoffs, and has made it through his own family rift as well.