The Books you will Read.

It’s early 1990s. I am now blessed to have four amazing, beautiful, strong and smart children. I work from my home based business as a Family Day Care provider so that I am an available parent to my own family. I am also a single parent trying to understand how it all went so wrong. So it was in these circumstances that I went to an evening in-service training session. This was in the early days when the speaker, the now Professor Matt Sanders the creator of the Triple P program on parenting, was just beginning his journey. The information he gave that night was simply illuminating.

At the close of his session, with tears in my eyes, I approached him and said, “I could hug you. You have just described what is going on in my life and I don’t know what to do.” He suggested I purchase this book.

And I did! Such an amazing, eye opening window into understanding. I began to understand myself better but more importantly I began to understand that humans can be fully grown, intelligent, well educated, handsome and or beautiful but still be emotionally a needy 2 year old. That they can be lost and stuck because of events that occurred in early childhood and that to find oneself requires a lot of work and only the brave are ever courageous enough to look inside and start the work. I also learnt that people stuck inside this pain have a full time job just surviving and there really is nothing left over to give.

All of us are just a little bit dysfunctional, because there are no perfect people, but some are dysfunctional with a capital D and this dysfunction is passed down generation to generation. Unless we begin the work of self examination and learn healthier, more life affirming ways to live we cannot break the cycle.

Your authentic “self” is your most precious possession; it is the only thing you have to share truthfully with another person. If you have lost yourself it is essential to do the work of recovery.

The highlight of this story is that while this book was still so fresh in my mind, its author, John Bradshaw, was on a speaking tour and visited the city where I was living and I, with thousands of others, attended the Convention Centre to hear him speak. Absolutely wonderful!

Just another little story in my way leads onto way life. Again so thankful for the people God puts in my life and through people and books the ongoing opportunity to learn and grow.