Family & Childhood
Family & Childhood
Family Patterns and Childhood Healing Books
Books for parent wounds, sibling relationships, childhood roles, estrangement, enmeshment and the patterns families pass down.
26 focused booksPDF + EPUB£8.88 each
Family & Childhood
The Childhood You Are Still Carrying
There is a strange thing that happens to grown adults, and if you have noticed it in yourself, this book is for you.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Enmeshed Family
There is a particular kind of family that looks, from the outside, like the very picture of closeness, and feels, from the inside, like a place where you can never quite become yourself: the enmeshed family, in which the boundaries between people have dissolved, so that there is no room…Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Father Wound
There is a wound that many people carry through their whole adult lives without ever quite naming it, a wound left by the relationship with their father, or by his absence, and it shapes them in ways they often do not recognise: how they see themselves, how they relate to others, how they…Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Inherited Anxiety
You have been anxious for as long as you can remember.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Mother Wound
There is a particular ache that comes from not having been mothered as you needed to be.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Narcissistic Parent
Growing up, you may have sensed that something was wrong, without ever being able to name it.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Only Child
There is a particular way of growing up that shapes a person quietly and profoundly, and that is often misunderstood by those who did not live it: growing up as an only child, the sole focus of one’s parents, without the siblings who fill most childhoods with rivalry and alliance, noise…Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Pattern You Learned at Home
There is a way you move through the world that you did not choose.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Sibling Wound
There is a wound that forms in what is often the longest relationship of a person’s life, the relationship with a brother or sister, and because siblings are supposed to be companions and allies, this wound is often unspoken, unrecognised, and carried in a particular kind of loneliness.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
When Your Parent Was the Child
There is a particular childhood that leaves a particular wound, the childhood of the child who had to be the grown-up, who had to parent their own parent, who never got to be a child because someone had to be the adult and it fell to them.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Eldest Daughter Effect
I have to open by taking something away from you, and I would rather do it on the first page than spring it on you later.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
When You Are Not Their Mother
Marguerite is forty-three, she lives outside Chester, and four years ago she married a man with two children.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Life That Was Bought for You
There is a sentence that some people cannot say, and it is not a dramatic sentence, and that is exactly why it is so heavy.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Test You Took for Fun
There is a sentence that people say to each other at Christmas now, cheerfully, in living rooms, in front of the whole family, and it is one of the more consequential sentences of our era and nobody has noticed.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Face I Never Saw
Marion was forty-one when she finally admitted to herself that she needed to find her birth mother.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Distance You Chose
Two years had passed since Simone last spoke to her mother, and from one day to the next she still could not tell whether she had done the bravest thing of her life or the most unforgivable.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
When Someone You Love Is in Prison
Rosamund is sixty-one, she is a retired school administrator, she lives outside Preston, and on Tuesday she was searched.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
What the Adults Decided
Alastair is thirty-eight. His parents divorced when he was nine, and he has spent twenty-nine years being told two contradictory things about it.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Sibling You Are Estranged From
Every Christmas Eve, Magnus writes a message to his sister and does not send it.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
After I Am Gone
Winnifred is seventy-four. Her son is forty-seven, has a profound learning disability, has lived at home his entire life, and cannot be left alone. She gets him up, washes him, dresses him, manages his medication, drives him to his day service three mornings a week, and is awake at five every day including the days she is ill. She has done this for forty-seven years, which is longer than most people's working lives.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The One They Blamed
Sanne noticed it happening again from across her mother's kitchen, the way she had noticed it a thousand times across forty-six years, and she felt the old familiar tightening in her chest that told her, before her mind had caught up, that she was about to be the problem. Someone had mentioned the disastrous Christmas of years ago, and heads had turned, gently, almost affectionately, toward her, because in this family the disastrous Christmas was Sanne's fault, the way most things that went wrong were somehow, when the story was finally told, Sanne's fault.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Woman You Were Before
Elin was sitting on the floor of the nursery at half past four in the afternoon, her four-month-old daughter asleep at last on her chest, and she was crying, quietly, in a way she could not have explained to anyone who asked. It was not that anything was wrong, exactly. The baby was healthy. Elin was healthy. By every external measure this was the thing she had wanted, had planned for, had been told would be the happiest chapter of her life. And she felt, underneath the love, which was real and enormous, a grief and a disorientation so large and so unspeakable that she had begun to think there was something seriously wrong with her.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
When You Carry the Weight of the Family
Anouk is forty-six, she is a pharmacist in Coventry, and she carries her family.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood
The Child You Looked Through
Cordelia was, everyone always said, no trouble at all. It took her forty years to understand that this was not a compliment.Read about this book →
Family & Childhood