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.)

Book Review: Where the Past Begins by Amy Tan

 

Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

 

This was not quite the book I expected when I started reading, but it was fascinating, nevertheless.

The opening is more about Tan’s writing. I had to laugh out loud when her introduction included some very humorous asides from her editor, Daniel Halpern.

In talking about her work on the book, she says – Even so, I did not miss a deadline, except one. The last.

But Halpern adds – [ed. Note: Technically, she was always a day late, using the excuse of PST, to protest her PTSD.]

I had thought this was a memoir about Tan’s writing, but it’s more about where she came from, both the circumstances of her growing up years, the way her parents interacted with her, and going back farther, to the stories of her ancestors that sparked her imagination.

There are excerpts from journals and even from novels that never made it to culmination.

I have embarked on an impossible task. I will have fewer than a hundred pages, always fewer than a hundred, and they are all bad . . . This is not writer’s block. This is chaos with no way out.

But the book is weighted heavily in the story of her family, something that fascinates many of us. Where her mother came from, where her father came from to a lesser degree – who they were as people- how she felt about events that happened in her childhood then how her understanding of them progressed as she looked deeper into the letters and journals and other artifacts her family left behind.

She always looked for signs that her mother was going to explode, so she could get ready for it, but this time she forgot.

There is a great deal about the experiences of her grandmother, her mother’s mother, in China and how that affected her mother and thus Tan. Tan shares the view of this history from multiple points in her life, and thus multiple perspectives, especially when new information makes things more clear. These stories factor heavily in Tan’s novels.

The sad or difficult things she experienced in life, the fearful ones too, are included here. I won’t go into detail but Tan has lived through some very sad and scary experiences in her life, like the time she was in a car crash in Europe that could have turned out far worse than it did.

At first, I did not love the section of letters back and forth with her editor. Because there are dates in between, I felt like I was missing information, but even more, I felt like the third wheel – listening to two other people have an inside conversation without being able to participate. However, I began to appreciate the insight to her writing method and mental state before, during, and after creating a novel.

This was a very deep and thoughtful book that offered the opportunity for reflection. It was not something I could rush through reading, and even now, I am sure if I went back and read it again, I would learn many new things. It makes me think about keeping a journal of my own and exploring my own family history more. I would definitely recommend.