Changing Course: Healing from Loss, Abandonment and Fear

Changing Course offers a model of healing for all adults whose lives have been burdened by pain. A family’s life together is troubled when the conditions that foster physical and emotional growth and well-being are continuously absent over time. The absence of these nurturing conditions has the cumulative effect of creating a childhood experience of chronic loss and abandonment. Within a family, the dynamics that create a sense of loss are denial, rigidity, isolation, and shame. Everyone will experience these things sometimes, or occasionally, but when any of these four factors are experienced to a severe degree they create an overriding sense of chronic loss. It is important to identify your losses. Until losses and pain are dealt with directly, the resulting feelings, while often masked, are carried into adulthood. Unless healthy coping skills are learned, this combination of past loss and pain leads to severe consequences creating even more pain in the present.

The possibility of healing is great if we allow ourselves to own our truth and garner the courage to walk through the pain. This revised edition of Changing Course (the true sequel to It Will Never Happen to Me) asks you to take action, to "get under way." It offers new exercises that will help you to begin this process.

To change course, be it a minor shift or a major turn in your life, does not mean giving up who you are, it means letting go of who you are not. It means letting go of your pain. It means letting go of an undesirable family script.

Each insight into your past and its connection to your present is like turning on the light in a dark room. It doesn’t change what is there, but now that you can see where you are going, you can go in and out freely without harm. Fear no longer drives you. Freedom moves you. Each new awareness brings new choices. Each new awareness is a turning point. In many ways recovery is like a sailboat that "comes about," turns to a new direction and allows the wind to refill its sails. Once you change course, then you are able to harness the power of the wind — your spiritual self. This is the journey charted in Changing Course.