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.)

 

The theme for our book club in February was “A Retelling.” They seem to be everywhere, particularly in Young Adult literature. I was able to pull a short collection of stories from my bookshelf at home called Upon a Once Time. Unfortunately, it isn’t one that would be widely available because it came from a Kickstarter by Todd Sanders of the Air and Nothingness Press. http://aanpress.com/ Though this book was a limited run and is sold out, they have quite a catalog of other books.

If you’ve never heard of such a thing, Kickstarters for books and games have become quite common. There’s a Kickstarter page devoted to “Publishing” which says “Explore how writers and publishers are using Kickstarter to bring new literature, periodicals, podcasts, and more to life.” The proposed projects run a fascinating gamut of fiction and non-fiction, including comics, art books, zines, and so much more. You can check it out at https://www.kickstarter.com/publishing. I’ve seen both new authors, anthologies of new and established authors, and even well-established authors creating projects through Kickstarter.

I thought the cover art for this book, by Serena Malyon, was incredibly lovely, giving the feel of a fantastical yesteryear very appropriate for fairy tale retellings. Malyon is a Canadian freelance illustrator and artist. Her site calls this piece “Tokens” and says it was worked in watercolour and gouache. Its colors are muted but the picture is detailed. You can view more of her artwork on her web site at https://www.serenamalyon.com/

It’s also nice that it was an anthology, showcasing 21 different authors. I love this way of getting to experience what different authors have to offer. I might like a couple stories, really not care for one at all, then find one that I absolutely loved! It’s a great way to find new authors to follow.

There was a Tom Thumb retelling set in space, Little Tom’s Reality by Rebecca E. Treasure, that caught my attention and the twist of it was particularly poignant to me. Tom is a small child never allowed to leave his living quarters because the winds would whisk him away. His home life is not pleasant though and one night he becomes desperate to see the outside so he sneaks into his mother’s spacesuit. When he opens the airlock, it is nothing like he imagined.

Diamonds, Toads, And… Pumpkins? by Melissa Mead was delightfully humorous and yet wretchedly realistic in how women have to sometimes put up with others deciding what their existence means and what they need. It reminded me a bit of a Sir Terry Pratchett story, whose long running Discworld series borrowed heavily from fairy tales and other fantastical stories. Excellent company to be in.

I always love a good golem story. I don’t know what it is about the idea that appeals to me so much, perhaps the alien-ness of experiencing the world as a clay person, not quite human, and often fumbling. The Rabbi’s Daughter And The Golem by Alex Langer did not disappoint as a retelling of Beauty and the Beast.

If you can get your hands on a copy of this book, I highly recommend it. I still have the companion volume to read.

The theme for our book club in March is “Self-improvement” and I’ve been reading ahead. I quickly finished the audio recording of The Life-Changing Magic of NOT GIVING A F*CK: how to stop spending time you don’t have with people you don’t like doing things you don’t want to do by Sarah Knight. It’s a truly practical parody.  I’ve picked up another, more serious, self-improvement book and I’ll have lots to recommend in this area next month.