"This fascinating appraisal of how to understand parents’ legacies on their adult children is packed with psychoanalytical insights and suggested ways to find a freer future."
From The School of Life stable that created How To Overcome Your Childhood, Getting Over Your Parents gets to grips with handling the symptoms of difficult childhoods. Offering a fresh framework through lucidly argued ideas, it also posits practical solutions that set out to help individuals find freedom from their parent-related problems.
First up, Getting Over Your Parents tackles a rather large elephant in the room trunk on. Namely, the prevailing scepticism around how modern psychotherapy often requires us to engage with our childhoods. In a nutshell, the introduction argues that “the human mind between the ages of 1 and 10 is dauntingly receptive…which means that our whole identity can be shaped decisively and near-permanently by our young experiences”.
That settled, the book shares what makes a good parent — someone who suspends judgment, listens and doesn’t “need excessive attention from their children”. Someone who knows how to be calm, but also “knows how to play ” — before presenting a run-down of different types of bad parents, and the cause and effects of each. These include everyone from the preoccupied parent, overprotective parent, and controlling parent, to the unhappily married parent, panicky parent, golden child parent, bullying parent, and more.
With checklists of parental behaviours and symptoms to help individuals identify their own experience, Getting Over Your Parents rounds off with a section devoted to exercises readers might use to overcome “difficult parents” to find a “new beginning”. As such, it’s both thought-provoking and practical.
| Primary Genre | Self Help and Personal Development |
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