Book Musing: Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships by Nedra Glover Tawwab

 

Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships

By Nedra Glover Tawwab

I’ve been following Nedra Glover Tawwab on Instagram for well over a year now, on the recommendation of a friend. She has been very enlightening and a wonderfully sane voice.

Tawwab is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a Masters in Social Work. Her first book, Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, was a New York Times bestseller. I’ve just picked up a copy and I’m looking forward to it. Honestly, I think most of us could use work on setting and maintaining boundaries in our professional and private lives.

Drama Free is remarkably well laid out and clear. Tawwab clearly defines the terms she is working with, illustrates them with examples, and then gives just a few prompts for exploring how they apply to your own relationships.

Part One is Unlearning Dysfunction, while Part Two moves into Healing, and Part Three moves on to Growing.

Tawwab shares some hallmarks of dysfunctional families, including “forgiving and forgetting with no change in behavior, moving on as if nothing happened, covering up problems for others, denying that a problem exists, keeping secrets that need to be share, pretending to be fine, not expressing your emotions, be around harmful people, and using aggression to get what you want.”

If anything there sounds familiar, this book is for you. Honestly, I don’t know many people who couldn’t benefit from this book. I was glad to see our library has a copy and I’d like to see a copy in our digital catalog as well.

Tawwab assures us that, “It’s often said that we are a product of our environment, but we can also be a product of exposure to healthy relationships outside the home.”

I’ve heard people who grow and achieve in life to say that they had great role models or even that they found a vision of a different way of life on television or in books.

Sometimes it’s hard to know where our reactions come from, the traumas that may have shaped us, but when we’re unaware that leaves us subject to reacting without thinking. It’s therefore important to explore why we do what we do.

 “Awareness is what saves us from repeating patterns. Understanding your story is a process that unfolds over time, and your story is constantly evolving.”

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand themselves a little better and particularly to anyone who wants to make peace with difficult familial relationships in their lives. I’ve heard of so many people cutting others out of their lives these days, but I think it’s worth exploring a different way of understanding and setting boundaries first.

Happy Reading! (And Healing.)