Excerpt
The Foreword to
Heal and Forgive II
Foreword by Mark Sichel, LCSW,
author of, Healing From Family Rifts : Ten Steps to Finding Peace After Being Cut Off From a Family Member
Heal and Forgive II continues Nancy Richards’ extraordinary struggle to heal the wounds of family abuse and estrangement. She candidly shares the horrors of her childhood and the challenge of family estrangement that she’s had to learn to live with as an adult. Her story is gripping and compelling. Richards touches the reader’s heart as she relates her endurance and stamina in the face of horrifying ill treatment and cruelty. She manages to avoid sensationalism by focusing on the repertoire of virtues she called upon to survive and heal. Her spiritual approach to healing involves forgiveness, generosity, hope, faith, strength and turning to a Higher Power as an overriding principle of recovery. Nancy has not only managed to carry on and thrive despite the cruelty she endured, she makes meaning out of her experience by giving the reader unbounded hope that compassion and kindness will help overcome even the worst family dysfunction and malevolence.
Heal and Forgive II is an important addition to the body of literature that addresses healing from family rifts. Despite being an “expert” in this subject, I am always in need of the collective wisdom shared by a community of survivors. Richards adds to each of our efforts to garner hope, wisdom and support to create lives of loving relationships unclouded by an abusive childhood.
For example, as a survivor of a seemingly permanent family estrangement, I was shocked when I reconciled with my father after I learned he was dying of leukemia. The illness had humbled him I thought, and I plunged back into a family dynamic that always left me bloody. I wish I had read Heal and Forgive II before I invited the abuse back into my life because Nancy’s wisdom about reconciliation would have grounded my illusion that my family had changed and protected me from the trauma that I inadvertently invited back into my life.
Nancy shares her struggles with reconciliation and shares her powerful feelings of fear, euphoria, disappointment, rejection, and finally, acceptance. She advises the reader to go slowly when there is an opportunity for reconciliation and that was precisely the advice that this expert needed to follow. Her conclusion throughout her journey is that forgiveness is the only way that healing can take place.
After attempting to reconcile with my family, I once again needed to heal. Nancy’s wisdom has become a compass to navigate my endless recovery. The author’s authenticity as she relates her challenges and set-backs will help any reader soothe their soul as they slowly move forward in healing from their particular trauma.
Nancy is guided by a demand on herself to act in a way that is correct and virtuous. She reminds the reader that gratitude and hope can sustain the reader’s challenge in navigating the minefield of each of our own family cut-offs. In her generosity and authenticity she makes meaning of her own experience and inspires to balance efforts to reach out to our families while protecting ourselves from further abuse.
I had hoped I could create a memory of my father as a man who offered love, strength and integrity. I wanted this for myself as well as my children. He had on rare occasions overcome his fragility and dying seemed to bring out the best in him with which to create positive memories. For a moment in time that was the case, but during a period of remission his true colors showed again and my father was poisoned by his rage, envy and hatred that characterized him for most of my life. I had hoped he could die at peace knowing he had repaired the rift that divided us for most of my life. He couldn’t.
As I read the pages of this most helpful book, Nancy’s hope, strength and wisdom helped me sustain my belief that I had done the correct thing in deciding to reconcile and forgive. She helped to shore up my faltering belief that I would have regretted not going through that last window and sweetened my disappointment with the knowledge I had done the right thing. Equally important, my actions and correctness benefited my children who loved their grandfather, yet could never understand his capacity to arbitrarily explode and act with cruelty. Heal and Forgive II serves as a reminder that my gratitude and good fortune in my family of creation far outweighs the flaw in my family of origin.
Unlike many authors who write on this subject, Nancy does not need to quantify the severity of the abuse and makes it clear that the overriding element of emotional and psychological damage is devastating no matter how the abusiveness manifested itself.
She touches the hearts of all of us whose abusive childhood has reached its defining moment in a loved one banishing us from what we have always known to be family. Richards then takes the reader by the hand and helps us re-write the defining moment in our lives by showing us how forgiveness can unlock the gates to freedom and serenity. Ultimately that is the only way anyone can survive a family cut-off and craft a life steeped in serenity and unconditional love for the loved ones who remain in our lives.
Perhaps the worst scarring of growing up with abuse is how it remains rooted in our psyches and becomes a barrier to fully enjoying life with the strength and wisdom of not allowing anyone’s abusiveness enter into our life. Nancy refuses to allow herself to re-create the hurtfulness and emotional violence of her childhood in her adult life and she gives the reader hope and wisdom as she takes us through her process of healing. Her refusal to perpetuate the abuse is fired by struggling to sort out the various aspects of being a virtuous human being. Nancy manages to exorcise her demons as much as any abuse survivor can. She moves the reader by declaring her newfound entitlement to harness constructive thoughts and action. She impressively models the moment-to-moment joy of being a loving and alive human being guided by gratitude, hope, generosity and confidence in her faith in a Higher Power.
The important part of Nancy Richards’ story is that she transcended her mother’s failures and flaws through compassion and forgiveness within herself. I hope her story will help all of us live more happily as we create abuse-free lives.