First published in 1989, Dan Allender's The Wounded Heart has helped hundreds of thousands of people come to terms with sexual abuse in their past. Now, more than twenty-five years later, Allender has written a brand-new book on the subject that takes into account recent discoveries about the lasting physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual ramifications of sexual abuse. With great compassion Allender offers hope for victims of rape, date rape, incest, molestation, sexting, sexual bullying, unwanted advances, pornography, and more, exposing the raw wounds that are left behind and clearing the path toward wholeness and healing. Never minimizing victims' pain or offering pat spiritual answers that don't truly address the problem, he instead calls evil evil and lights the way to renewed joy. Counselors, pastors, and friends of those who have suffered sexual harm will find in this book the deep spiritual guidance they need to effectively minister to the sexually broken around them. Victims themselves will find here a sympathetic friend to walk alongside them on the road to healing.
Understanding the Wounded Heart(second edition)The world wounds us. The devil lies to us. We vow never to let it happen again. We spend our lives picking up the fruit of our wounds.It doesn't have to stay this way.This book introduces a simple model for understanding the wounded heart and offers some practical, transferable tools for experiencing God's healing and transformation. Understanding the Wounded Heart builds on the core model taught at Deeper Walk seminars of wounds-lies-vows-strongholds. It explains four tools for helping people experience healing: building joy, taking thoughts captive, forgiveness, and listening prayer.
The “fascinating” #1 New York Times bestseller that awakened the world to the destruction of American Indians in the nineteenth-century West (The Wall Street Journal). First published in 1970, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee generated shockwaves with its frank and heartbreaking depiction of the systematic annihilation of American Indian tribes across the western frontier. In this nonfiction account, Dee Brown focuses on the betrayals, battles, and massacres suffered by American Indians between 1860 and 1890. He tells of the many tribes and their renowned chiefs—from Geronimo to Red Cloud, Sitting Bull to Crazy Horse—who struggled to combat the destruction of their people and culture. Forcefully written and meticulously researched, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee inspired a generation to take a second look at how the West was won. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Dee Brown including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
In November 2004, Lora Jones was a happy wife and proud mother of two beautiful children. Lora and her family left for a family vacation, excited to celebrate the holidays, but sounds of music and laughter in their van were shattered by a head-on collision. Lora watched helplessly as, one-by-one, her beloved family slipped into eternity. Awake in a nightmare, all traces of laughter were replaced by the mournful cries of a wounded heart. How in the world could Lora go on alone? Song of a Wounded Heart tells the true story of Lora’s journey from death to hope. Unbelievably, God sang to her the night of the accident. “Do not be afraid,” He whispered, “This is for my glory.” How could that be possible? She was crushed under the enormous pain, unable to think. In the months to come, as she struggled to understand, God patiently continued to sing, drawing her gently to His side, daring her to trust Him. Lora shares her personal journal entries, including the Bible reading plan God used to speak to her and stories of people in the Bible who also struggled with faith. Join Lora in Song of a Wounded Heart as she asks God questions, deals with anger and loneliness, and chooses to believe in the goodness of God, in spite of the circumstances.
A radically fresh interpretation of how we can best serve others from the bestselling author of The Return of the Prodigal Son, hailed as “one of the world’s greatest spiritual writers” by Christianity Today “In our own woundedness, we can become a source of life for others.” In this hope-filled and profoundly simple book, Henri Nouwen inspires devoted men and women who want to be of service in their church or community but who have found traditional outreach alienating and ineffective. Weaving keen cultural analysis with his psychological and religious insights, Nouwen presents a balanced and creative theology of service that begins with the realization of fundamental woundedness in human nature. According to Nouwen, ministers are called to identify the suffering in their own hearts and make that recognition the starting point of their service. Ministers must be willing to go beyond their professional, somewhat aloof roles and leave themselves open as fellow human beings with the same wounds and suffering as those they serve. In other words, we heal from our wounds. The Wounded Healer is a thoughtful and insightful guide that will be welcomed by anyone engaged in the service of others.
The literary study of emotion is part of an important revisionary movement among scholars eager to recast emotional politics for the twenty-first century. Looking beyond the traditional categories of sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy, Jennifer Travis suggests a new approach to reading emotionalism among men. She argues that the vocabulary of injury, with its evaluations of victimhood and its assessments of harm, has deeply influenced the cultural history of emotions. From the Civil War to the early twentieth century, Travis traces the history of male emotionalism in American discourse. She argues that injury became a comfortable vocabulary--particularly among white middle-class men--through which to articulate and to claim a range of emotional wounds. The debates about injury that flourished in the cultural arenas of medicine, psychology, and the law spilled over into the realm of fiction, as Travis demonstrates through readings of works by Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Willa Cather, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Travis concludes by linking this history to twenty-first-century preoccupations with "pain-centered politics," which, she cautions, too often focuses only on women and racial minorities.
On a sweltering Fourth of July, the suicide of fourteen-year-old Maureen Bower’s father shatters her security. She fears that eventually, everyone she loves will abandon her. With the words, “May I have this dance,” Frank Russo introduces himself to Maureen at a roller-skating rink. As he teaches her skate dancing, she falls deeply in love with him. Meanwhile, the country advances further into World War 2. They wait until they feel it is safe to marry only to return from their honeymoon to find Frank’s draft notice. He leaves for the Pacific and is gone for the next three years. When Frank’s best friend, Harvey, dies at Normandy, Maureen’s closest friend, June, walks out of her life too. Frank returns from the war physically and emotionally scarred, Maureen does her best to mend him until their first child’s birth hastens his recovery. They share rich experiences, develop close friendships, raise two daughters and eventually welcome the young women’s husbands into their lives. When their children move from Brooklyn, New York to suburban Connecticut, Frank and Maureen follow and become active volunteers at the Bristol Senior Center. On the night of Lieutenant William Calley’s conviction for the Mai Lai Massacre however, Frank is overcome with guilt. When he confesses his own wartime atrocities to Maureen, she struggles to understand the man she thought she knew. Through fifty-plus years of marriage, Frank becomes the center of Maureen’s world until his sudden death shatters her faith and rekindles her deep fear of abandonment. She can’t escape from the crushing loneliness. Friends, family and even ministers are helpless to lift her from her depression. Maureen finds tasks like driving a car, paying the bills, even cleaning the house overwhelming and her smallest joy feels like a betrayal to Frank. As she prepares to end her suffering, help comes from the unlikeliest of sources: Doris Cantrell. Following an abusive childhood, a troubled marriage and estrangement with her own daughter, Doris is as damaged as is Maureen. The mistreatment she inflicts on others evidences her contempt, yet underneath it all, Maureen senses a deep sadness. Doris refuses to sympathize with Maureen’s plight and persists in exposing her to different experiences and new ways of living. Maureen also refuses to accept that Doris’s past gave her the right to abuse people in the present or to neglect her bond with her daughter. Both women lack the strength or will to help anyone. Nevertheless, God has His own plan for these wounded angels. The inconsolable widow and the uncontrollable social misfit manage to support and help heal each other. They do this, not despite their brokenness, but because of it. Maureen and Doris become close friends. As Maureen heals, the widower, Larry Kowalski, reenters her life. Through their shared experiences of love and loss, they fall deeply in love. However, will her daughters understand her being with another man? In addition, can Maureen’s friendship with Doris survive her love for Larry?
What would it take for you to stop loving God? At some point thinking Christians must wrestle with the question, "If God loves me, why did He let this happen?" In Wounded Head, Wounded Heart the question is not explored theologically, but experientially. As the story opens, Robb's mom is questioning God because of the poverty they have endured since returning from the mission field. Then Robb, age seventeen, is in a car accident which leaves him in a deep coma with multiple injuries. Who is this God? God claims to protect us, but bad things happen. God claims he is just, but life is unfair. God claims to love us, but life hurts. Robb's mom cannot deny her experiences, yet she knows the Bible is true. She cannot reconcile what she knows of Scripture to what she has seen and experienced. So, she begins her quest for a way to harmonize God's claims and her reality. This emotionally intense and thought-provoking story will challenge readers to consider how their own experiences have impacted their faith. Wounded Head, Wounded Heart is a story of hope for everyone who has ever asked, "God, why?"
Early on in her clinical practice, psychoanalyst Pilar Jennings was presented with a particularly difficult case: a six-year-old girl who, traumatized by loss, had stopped speaking. Challenged by the limitations of her training to respond effectively to the isolating effect of childhood trauma, Jennings takes the unconventional path of inviting her friend Lama Pema—a kindly Tibetan Buddhist monk who experienced his own life-shaping trauma at a very young age—into their sessions. In the warm therapeutic space they create, the young girl slowly begins to heal. The result is a fascinating case study of the intersection of Western psychology and Buddhist teachings. Pilar’s story is for therapists, parents, Buddhists, or any of us who hold out the hope that even the deepest childhood wounds can be the portal to our capacity to love and be loved.
