Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Dysfunctional Families

When Sandra Leigh was seven years old, she fell into the role of protector of her mother and three younger siblings. One winter night, she ushered her mother out of the house during one of her father’s tirades, and then snuck her back into the dark home through a window. Sandra was used to events like these; what she wasn’t used to were the mountains and nature surrounding her new home in West Virginia.

While hiking on a solo vacation in a remote, uninhabitable region of Arizona, Zachary Anderegg happened upon Riley, an emaciated puppy clinging to life, at the bottom of a 350-foot canyon. In a daring act of humanity that trumped the deliberate savagery behind Riley’s presence in such a place, Zak single-handedly orchestrated a rescue. What didn’t come out in the initial burst of publicity this story received is that Zak and Riley’s destinies were intertwined long before they improbably found each other.

A light in the darkness for severely troubled children, former special education teacher Torey Hayden faced three of her most extraordinary challenges after she left the classroom. Nine-year-old Cassandra, kidnapped by her father and found starving, dirty, and picking through garbage cans - a child prone to long silences and erratic, violent behavior, whose hard-won recollections of the nightmare she endured could not be fully trusted.

A dramatic and remarkable narrative of an extraordinary teacher's determination, from the author of the Sunday Times bestsellers The Tiger's Child and One Child. Torey Hayden faced six emotionally troubled kids no other teacher could handle - three recent arrivals from battle-torn Northern Ireland, badly traumatized by the horrors of war; an eleven-year-old boy, who only knew life inside an institution; an excitable girl, aggressive and sexually precocious at the age of eight; and seven-year-old Leslie, perhaps the most hopeless of all, unresponsive and unable to speak.

For more than two years, BBC Radio 4's The Archers ran a disturbing storyline centred on Helen Tichener's abuse at the hands of her husband Rob. Not the kind of abuse that leaves a bruise, but the sort of coercive control that breaks your spirit and makes it almost impossible to walk away. As she listened to the unfolding story, Helen Walmsley-Johnson was forced to confront her own agonising past. Helen's first husband controlled her life, from the people she saw to what was in her bank account.

Jadie never spoke. She never laughed, or cried, or uttered any sound. Despite efforts to reach her, Jadie remained locked in her own troubled world - until one remarkable teacher persuaded her to break her self-imposed silence. Nothing in all of Torey Hayden's experience could have prepared her for the shock of what Jadie told her - a story too horrendous for Torey's professional colleagues to acknowledge.

When a parent singles out a child for special privileges and attention, that child is often unaware that the relationship is unhealthy - even incestuous. As adults, these children struggle to feel validated, because while they have not been directly abused, they feel a sense of violation and crossed boundaries - usually done in the name of 'love' and 'caring'. The parent's love feels more confining than freeing, more demanding than giving, more intrusive than nurturing. Yet these children suffer from what psychologist Kenneth Adams calls The Silent Seduction.

His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn't talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn't been out of the building in the four years since he'd come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn't take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16. Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin's adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked.

From the time she was a little girl, Maryam rebelled against the terrible second-class existence that was her destiny as an Afghan woman. She had witnessed the miserable fate of her grandmother and three aunts, and wished she had been born a boy. As a feisty teenager in Kabul, she was outraged when the Russians invaded her country. After she made a public show of defiance, she had to flee the country for her life. A new life of freedom seemed within her grasp, but her father arranged a traditional marriage to a fellow Afghan, who turned out to be a violent man....

Surviving is unlike any memoir of survivorship, given its nuance, compassion, and candor. Above all, it is an exquisitely powerful testament to Gooden’s healing, survivorship, and dedication to helping others do the same.

Some people are so stressful to be around they can actually make us ill. This book looks at the relationships that may drag us down and drain our energy. It gives us the tools to recognise toxic people and places so that we never need give in to them again. It explains that our freedom lies in our own hands and has to do with making choices and decisions, setting proper boundaries and drawing back from situations in which we tend to feel like victims. This may mean weeding out our address book and going lonely for a while - but never fear, says Dr Cantopher, givers will turn up once we eliminate the takers from our lives.

What does it really mean to be a man? In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life - one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.

Like millions of women, Eve Ensler has been waiting much of her lifetime for an apology. Sexually and physically abused by her father, Eve has struggled her whole life from this betrayal, longing for an honest reckoning from a man who is long dead. After years of work as an anti-violence activist, she decided she would wait no longer; an apology could be imagined, by her, for her, to her.

At eight years old, Tuesday Storm's childhood is forever lost when the death of her older sister Audrey sends her family spiraling out of control into the darkest of dysfunction. In the wake of the tragedy, Tuesday's mother, distraught and looking for a scapegoat, singles Tuesday out from her siblings to take on the blame for Audrey's death, and then targets her for unspeakable abuse.

If your kids aren’t learning about sex from you, what are they learning about sex, and who is teaching them? Having "the talk" with your child does not have to be a terrifying and awkward event. Armed with The Sex-Wise Parent, Dr. Janet Rosenzweig’s groundbreaking book, you may find you never have to have "the talk". Dr. Rosenzweig shows you how you can help protect your children from sexual abuse, trauma, and bullying through your everyday interaction with them.

Meredith Maran lived a daughter's nightmare: she accused her father of sexual abuse, then realized, nearly too late, that he was innocent. During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans became convinced that they had repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy. Journalist, mother, and daughter Meredith Maran was one of them.

Hidden far from sight, deep in the thick underbrush of the North Florida woods are the ghostly graves of more than 30 unidentified bodies, some of which are thought to be children who were beaten to death at the old Florida Industrial School for Boys at Marianna. It is suspected that many more bodies will be found in the fields and swamplands surrounding the institution.

The hallmarks of America’s War on Terror have been repeated long deployments and a high percentage of troops returning with psychological problems. Family members of combat veterans are at a higher risk of potentially lethal domestic violence than almost any other demographic; it’s estimated that one in four children of active-duty service members has symptoms of depression; and nearly one million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan require increased care due to physical or psychological trauma.

Written in prose at once unflinching and acrobatic, Aron delivers a piercing memoir of romance and addiction, drawing on intimate anecdote as well as academic research to crack open the long-feminised and overlooked phenomenon of codependency. She shifts between visceral, ferocious accounts of her affair with K and introspective analysis of the part she plays in his addictions, as well as defining moments in the history of codependency, from temperance to the formation of Al-Anon to more recent research in the psychology of addiction.

Si creciste en una familia caótica, violenta, hipercrítica o emocionalmente abusiva; si recibiste cuidados materiales, pero te faltó el consuelo y la atención emocional; si fuiste relegado, olvidado o abandonado por los tuyos: entonces sufres el impacto de una Familia Zero. Ello causó en ti numerosas heridas psicológicas y emocionales. La lectura de este libro del Dr. Iñaki Piñuel te ayudará a: dejar de dar la espalda a la dolorosa realidad de tu infancia y de tu familia de origen; dejar de estar siempre alerta, de tener que defenderte y controlarlo todo; y mas.