Toxic Blood

One Path to Recovery From Childhood Trauma and Familial Abuse

Utilizing raw vulnerability, honesty, and insight, Toxic Blood examines in detail the events and emotional processes of living through neglect, betrayal, gaslighting, and manipulation, hidden under the illusion of unconditional love and caring from my parents.  This memoir delves into key themes and events of my life and my understanding of how and why both I and my family behaved as we did.  I explore the dynamics involved to make as much sense as I can out of the senseless trauma my family inflicted upon me, and explain why it was a decades-long journey to find myself and do enough healing to finally be capable of saying, “No more.”

Advice given to those suffering emotional abuse far too often emphasizes how to ignore the trauma and seek reconciliation.  Instead, we need to teach how to discern whether relationships are repairable, or it is best to walk away.  It is important to illustrate that even if accountability leads to removing family from your life, it is still worth pursuing for the personal healing and wellbeing that it brings.  It is important to give voice and courage to other people who are having difficulty identifying abuses, placing clear boundaries, and cutting off unrepentantly toxic people from their lives.  I am speaking, not just to those whose abuses were obvious and acknowledged, but to those who suffered in miserable silence, unaware that what they endured was not OK and should not be normal.  In an ideal world, most of these things would never happen to anyone, but instead I think it is far more common than we, as a society, want to admit to ourselves.

This memoir is released in both written and video formats, for greater accessibility. It is entirely free of charge.

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Contents:

  1. Declarations of Love
  2. Perfect Trust
  3. Critical Introspection
  4. Artists Always Starve
  5. Mud Pies
  6. Are You My Mommy?
  7. 12 Steps Forward – 12 Steps Back
  8. That is Satanic
  9. Never There
  10. Pulling the Wings off of Flies
  11. Putting on Your Face
  12. Drugs are Bad
  13. Medical Overcompensation
  14. Home Improvement
  15. When Are You Going to Have a Baby?
  16. Groomsmaid
  17. Super-Genius
  18. A Better Future
  19. Best Friends
  20. Relationship Status
  21. Chronic Problems
  22. Master of Illusion
  23. Too Little, Too Insincere, Too Late