Losing and Finding My Father

Losing and Finding My Father PDF Author: Kira Freed
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692317099
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Losing and Finding My Father is an adult daughter's journey of discovery sparked by the illness, coma, and subsequent death of her father. Having struggled for years to come to terms with a childhood marked by his invalidation and abuse, she attends to her ailing father, converses with him even during his coma, and uncovers the love hidden deep within their painful relationship. It is a story of loss -- loss of childhood trust, loss of self-esteem and desire for intimacy, loss of the father. Ultimately, it is a story of revelation -- about finding one's voice, softening emotional armor, forgiving the past, creating pathways to intimacy, and revising one's life story. Losing and Finding My Father offers a promise of growth and healing to children (and parents) of all ages and weaves together the following themes: * Challenging cultural attitudes about grief * Exploring "right relationship" with having been abused as a child * Authentic forgiveness * The power of emotions to heal * Conscious caretaking * Developing the capacity to have a healthy intimate relationship The book also offers a substantial appendix of self-help tools and exercises. From the foreword by Richard Schwartz, PhD, developer of the Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy: "When her father was dying, Kira Freed had the courage to take the healing path. Her carefully and beautifully documented journey provides a model for anyone who might consider this difficult route." "If you've experienced the loss of a loved one who was a source of pain and challenges throughout your life, reach for Kira Freed's book Losing and Finding My Father. Her poignant stories, processing tools, and personal healing will give you hope, guidance, and a way forward -- through and beyond your own grief." -- Carol McClelland, PhD, author of The Seasons of Change: Using Nature's Wisdom to Grow Through Life's Inevitable Ups and Downs "Losing and Finding My Father is Kira Freed's personal story, and this story is a teaching tale. In it, Kira shares her journey of resolving the effects of living with an abusive father whom she also loved deeply. Throughout, we are invited to share in the complex legacy of trauma intertwined with the healing opportunities that Kira courageously engaged. She also includes an appendix filled with a variety of approaches she used to support her healing -- powerful resources and practices for anyone taking this journey." -- Nancy J. Napier, LMFT, author of Getting Through the Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children "Kira has written a poignant and intimate account of her father's dying and of her grief. In clear language she shares with us the struggles, pain, healings and even transformation that so many of us have experienced with the death of a parent. Reading her book will both comfort and inspire you." -- Alexandra Kennedy, psychotherapist and author of Losing a Parent and The Infinite Thread

Losing and Finding My Father

Losing and Finding My Father PDF Author: Kira Freed
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692317099
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
Losing and Finding My Father is an adult daughter's journey of discovery sparked by the illness, coma, and subsequent death of her father. Having struggled for years to come to terms with a childhood marked by his invalidation and abuse, she attends to her ailing father, converses with him even during his coma, and uncovers the love hidden deep within their painful relationship. It is a story of loss -- loss of childhood trust, loss of self-esteem and desire for intimacy, loss of the father. Ultimately, it is a story of revelation -- about finding one's voice, softening emotional armor, forgiving the past, creating pathways to intimacy, and revising one's life story. Losing and Finding My Father offers a promise of growth and healing to children (and parents) of all ages and weaves together the following themes: * Challenging cultural attitudes about grief * Exploring "right relationship" with having been abused as a child * Authentic forgiveness * The power of emotions to heal * Conscious caretaking * Developing the capacity to have a healthy intimate relationship The book also offers a substantial appendix of self-help tools and exercises. From the foreword by Richard Schwartz, PhD, developer of the Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy: "When her father was dying, Kira Freed had the courage to take the healing path. Her carefully and beautifully documented journey provides a model for anyone who might consider this difficult route." "If you've experienced the loss of a loved one who was a source of pain and challenges throughout your life, reach for Kira Freed's book Losing and Finding My Father. Her poignant stories, processing tools, and personal healing will give you hope, guidance, and a way forward -- through and beyond your own grief." -- Carol McClelland, PhD, author of The Seasons of Change: Using Nature's Wisdom to Grow Through Life's Inevitable Ups and Downs "Losing and Finding My Father is Kira Freed's personal story, and this story is a teaching tale. In it, Kira shares her journey of resolving the effects of living with an abusive father whom she also loved deeply. Throughout, we are invited to share in the complex legacy of trauma intertwined with the healing opportunities that Kira courageously engaged. She also includes an appendix filled with a variety of approaches she used to support her healing -- powerful resources and practices for anyone taking this journey." -- Nancy J. Napier, LMFT, author of Getting Through the Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children "Kira has written a poignant and intimate account of her father's dying and of her grief. In clear language she shares with us the struggles, pain, healings and even transformation that so many of us have experienced with the death of a parent. Reading her book will both comfort and inspire you." -- Alexandra Kennedy, psychotherapist and author of Losing a Parent and The Infinite Thread

Finding My Father

Finding My Father PDF Author: Deborah Tannen
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 110188584X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A #1 New York Times bestselling author traces her father’s life from turn-of-the-century Warsaw to New York City in an intimate memoir about family, memory, and the stories we tell. “An accomplished, clear-eyed, and affecting memoir about a man who is at once ordinary and extraordinary.”—Forward Long before she was the acclaimed author of a groundbreaking book about women and men, praised by Oliver Sacks for having “a novelist’s ear for the way people speak,” Deborah Tannen was a girl who adored her father. Though he was often absent during her childhood, she was profoundly influenced by his gift for writing and storytelling. As she grew up and he grew older, she spent countless hours recording conversations with her father for the account of his life she had promised him she’d write. But when he hands Tannen journals he kept in his youth, and she discovers letters he saved from a woman he might have married instead of her mother, she is forced to rethink her assumptions about her father’s life and her parents’ marriage. In this memoir, Tannen embarks on the poignant, yet perilous, quest to piece together the puzzle of her father’s life. Beginning with his astonishingly vivid memories of the Hasidic community in Warsaw, where he was born in 1908, she traces his journey: from arriving in New York City in 1920 to quitting high school at fourteen to support his mother and sister, through a vast array of jobs, including prison guard and gun-toting alcohol tax inspector, to eventually establishing the largest workers’ compensation law practice in New York and running for Congress. As Tannen comes to better understand her father’s—and her own—relationship to Judaism, she uncovers aspects of his life she would never have imagined. Finding My Father is a memoir of Eli Tannen’s life and the ways in which it reflects the near century that he lived. Even more than that, it’s an unflinching account of a daughter’s struggle to see her father clearly, to know him more deeply, and to find a more truthful story about her family and herself.

The Story of My Father

The Story of My Father PDF Author: Sue Miller
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307432661
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In the fall of 1988, Sue Miller found herself caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer's disease. She was, she claims, perhaps the least constitutionally suited of all her siblings to be in the role in which she suddenly found herself, and in The Story of My Father she grapples with the haunting memories of those final months and the larger narrative of her father's life. With compassion, self-scrutiny, and an urgency born of her own yearning to rescue her father's memory from the disorder and oblivion that marked his dying and death, Sue Miller takes us on an intensely personal journey that becomes, by virtue of her enormous gifts of observation, perception, and literary precision, a universal story of fathers and daughters. James Nichols was a fourth-generation minister, a retired professor from Princeton Theological Seminary. Sue Miller brings her father brilliantly to life in these pages-his religious faith, his endless patience with his children, his gaiety and willingness to delight in the ridiculous, his singular gifts as a listener, and the rituals of church life that stayed with him through his final days. She recalls the bitter irony of watching him, a church historian, wrestle with a disease that inexorably lays waste to notions of time, history, and meaning. She recounts her struggle with doctors, her deep ambivalence about many of her own choices, and the difficulty of finding, continually, the humane and moral response to a disease whose special cruelty it is to dissolve particularities and to diminish, in so many ways, the humanity of those it strikes. She reflects, unforgettably, on the variable nature of memory, the paradox of trying to weave a truthful narrative from the threads of a dissolving life. And she offers stunning insight into her own life as both a daughter and a writer, two roles that swell together here in a poignant meditation on the consolations of storytelling. With the care, restraint, and consummate skill that define her beloved and best-selling fiction, Sue Miller now gives us a rigorous, compassionate inventory of two lives, in a memoir destined to offer comfort to all sons and daughters struggling-as we all eventually must-to make peace with their fathers and with themselves.

Finding My Father

Finding My Father PDF Author: Marian Poeppelmeyer
Publisher: Author Academy Elite
ISBN: 9781640856295
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
On Nov. 1, 1955, the bombing of US Air Lines Flight 629 outside Denver, Colorado, left 44 people instantly killed and a nation stunned. How does one family pick up their shattered lives and move on? Finding My Father delves into the ripple effect of tragedy and trauma in this family's life who lost a husband and father in this historical event.

Lost Fathers

Lost Fathers PDF Author: Laraine Herring
Publisher: Hazelden Publishing
ISBN: 9781592851553
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Examines the long-term ramifications for adult women who, as adolescent girls, lost their fathers to death, divorce, or addiction; helps them understand how their behaviors were shaped by that loss at a pivotal developmental stage; and provides some interactive exercises to help them heal. Original.

Grieving the Death of a Father

Grieving the Death of a Father PDF Author: Harold Ivan Smith
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
Losing a father can be a complex and confusing transition. Grief counselor and educator Harold Ivan Smith compassionately guides readers through their grief, from the process of dying through the acts of remembering and honoring a father after his death.

Finding Father

Finding Father PDF Author: A. J. Jones
Publisher: XP Publishing
ISBN: 1936101378
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


Reading My Father

Reading My Father PDF Author: Alexandra Styron
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416595066
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
PART MEMOIR AND PART ELEGY, READING MY FATHER IS THE STORY OF A DAUGHTER COMING TO KNOW HER FATHER AT LAST— A GIANT AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVELISTS AND A MAN WHOSE DEVASTATING DEPRESSION DARKENED THE FAMILY LANDSCAPE. In Reading My Father, William Styron’s youngest child explores the life of a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, Darkness Visible, so searingly chronicled his battle with major depression. Alexandra Styron’s parents—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. A drinker, a carouser, and above all “a high priest at the altar of fiction,” Styron helped define the concept of The Big Male Writer that gave so much of twentieth-century American fiction a muscular, glamorous aura. In constant pursuit of The Great Novel, he and his work were the dominant force in his family’s life, his turbulent moods the weather in their ecosystem. From Styron’s Tidewater, Virginia, youth and precocious literary debut to the triumphs of his best-known books and on through his spiral into depression, Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life, offering a ringside seat on a great literary generation’s friendships and their dramas. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written, with humor, compassion, and grace.

Mindfulness and Grief

Mindfulness and Grief PDF Author: Heather Stang
Publisher: Ryland Peters & Small
ISBN: 178249782X
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Without proper support, navigating the icy waters of grief may feel impossible. The grieving person may feel spiritually bankrupt and often the loss is so painful that the bereaved may lose faith in what they once held dear. Mindfulness meditation can restore hope by offering a compassionate safe haven for healing and self-reflection. While nobody can predict the path of someone else's grief, this book will guide the reader forward through the grieving process with simple mindfulness-based exercises to restore mind, body and spirit. These easy-to-follow meditations will help the reader to cope with the pain of loss, and embark on a healing journey. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of grief, and the guided meditations will calm the mind and increase clarity and focus. Mindfulness and Grief will help readers to begin the process of reconstructing the shattered self that is left in the wake of any major loss.

The Beauty of What Remains

The Beauty of What Remains PDF Author: Steve Leder
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 059342137X
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The national bestseller From the author of the bestselling More Beautiful Than Before comes an inspiring book about loss based on his most popular sermon. As the senior rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in the world, Steve Leder has learned over and over again the many ways death teaches us how to live and love more deeply by showing us not only what is gone but also the beauty of what remains. This inspiring and comforting book takes us on a journey through the experience of loss that is fundamental to everyone. Yet even after having sat beside thousands of deathbeds, Steve Leder the rabbi was not fully prepared for the loss of his own father. It was only then that Steve Leder the son truly learned how loss makes life beautiful by giving it meaning and touching us with love that we had not felt before. Enriched by Rabbi Leder's irreverence, vulnerability, and wicked sense of humor, this heartfelt narrative is filled with laughter and tears, the wisdom of millennia and modernity, and, most of all, an unfolding of the profound and simple truth that in loss we gain more than we ever imagined.