Customer Reviews

Healing From Family Rifts : Ten Steps to Finding Peace After Being Cut Off From a Family Member

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mark Sichel's book offers practical and helpful advice from the first chapter to the last. I read about the book in the Ask Amy column in my newspaper (she replaced Ann Landers), bought it here, and have devoured it. His insight, compassion, and courage to share his personal experiences helped me to not feel crazy about the situation with my own family, and his practical suggestions for repairing a fractured family are like a Bible for the dysfunctional family. I highly recommend this book. I think other readers who have been suffering as I had will feel relieved, calmer, and saner after reading Sichel's book. If you're having estrangement issues or chronic feuding with your family, this is the book for you.

This book allowed me to go on with my life.  I felt like a total flop as a mother  because my son and his wife haven't spoken to me and won't return calls or letters or allow me to see my grandchildren. As I read the book, I learned I need to focus on all the succesful relationships in my life. I finally feel okay knowing I made every effort to mend things and they refuse to do so.   I highly recommend it to anyone who's got a relative who's said that they're never again speaking to them, especially to a parent who's going through a tragedy like mine. The author is smart, compassionate, and gives many practical tools for moving on and feeling better about yourself, whether you can heal the relationship or not.

This book really cuts to the heart of the subject of losing one's family. What I really like about the book is the author's empathetic and effective approach to understanding, coping, and finally recovering from the tragedy of involuntary exile from family or relative. Step by step, he makes it possible to understand and deal with an often deeply painful life trauma. Mr. Sichel gives us all the gory details: but the book is ultimately one of hope and healing. As someone who has in some measure experienced family cutoff, I found the book to be of great comfort and usefulness; and would unconditionally recommend it to anyone who faces similar circumstances, or to those who know a friend or loved one going through such an ordeal.

This book was just what I needed. After my brother and I went through a painful fight, he vowed never to speak to me again. My whole being had been shattered. Days would go by where I would barely eat and just lie in bed for hours and hours. Looking online for some help, I discovered this book and it changed my outlook. Reading the stories of those who've gone through trials like my own helped heal my wounds. With each step, I found the courage to move on with my life and continue living. Finally, I regained the strength to let the pain wash away. If you've been cutoff or disowned by your family and feel yourself shaken to the core, this book will be your map to finding happiness again.

If you are experiencing a rupture in the family,I hope you do get Mark Sichel's book, Healing from Family Rifts. I did. I wish I had it years ago. After 11 years of learning to deal with my only child's addiction, and surviving a divorce after 24 years of marriage, Mark's book is opening up new avenues of exploration for my own life.

There is great information and concrete ideas throughout Sichel's book. There are ideas to implement that help us deal with the problems involved in family estrangement. We discover ways to make meaning out of our experience - a meaning from which we can grow as individuals. Mark's ten step program gives us a way out of the trauma we have experienced. It will make you think. And thinking about our lives is always a positive good. As Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Mark helps us examine our lives.

I highly recommend Healing from Family Rifts for anyone dealing with family dysfunction and fracture. We've got nothing to lose but that pain we are feeling. We do have everything to gain - most importantly, our lives.

Most family estrangement books and "experts" insist that blood relatives must reconcile at any cost, and blame must always be shared: you may be blameless or a victim, but you must make concessions until peace is made. But that peace is often temporary, since only you, not other members, are forced to change. Challenging this "blood-above-all" sentiment is one of our last taboos. Besides discussing the usual healing methods, this book covers, in an accepting and understanding way, what to do when reconciliation isn't possible. There is no judgment present, only a deep acceptance of those rifts that are ultimately unmendable and sympathetic support for those suffering grief because of them. It offers ways to survive permanent rifts, such as choosing & creating your own new family. (Unfortunately, the family members who buy & read these books are usually NOT the ones who most need to read them: those "externalizers" always blaming others and usually causing the rifts.)

The experience of being cut off by one's family is extremely painful. Mark Sichel captures that experience well and helps the reader mitigate the shock and initial pain of that experience. However, the means for resolving the situation is lacking, not because it should be resolved easily, but because of the dichotomous thinking the author uses to explain the problem--the roles family members play as "injustice collectors" and "people pleasers". These roles are cast as solid and entrenched: one is "either-or". Sichel also states that those who read the book are likely to be "people pleasers", which makes me a people pleaser--a good guy. However, I'm left wondering if the roles are as rigid as Sichel makes them--can an "injustice collector" also be a "people pleaser"? How can we best deal with family rifts without re-casting each other into these roles? Family rifts seem much more complex than the author recognizes.

I was impressed by how the author outlined the effects and underlying trauma that accompany a family rift. Such insights are really helpful and useful in understanding how to move on from the feelings of paralysis that often accompany rifts. Rarely does a book leave you feeling that a problem is much more manageable, but this one does. I have gotten copies for family members and friends.

Reeling from I family rift, I found this book and it proved to be a godsend.

A family rift feels like a death, but you are not dead. For a time, I carried the book around everywhere. When I felt down, I referred too it, it really helped. It helped me recognize though in pain, I was alive and that even though my life was not so great at that time, it was nonetheless a gift from God.

You are never the same after a family rift, but this book makes it clear that you can choose whether the change is good or bad. You will come to realize that you can't change the family member from whom you have become estranged but you can choose how you react to them and the estrangement.

Read this book and embark on a wonderful journey of healing.

I ordered this book after yet another round of verbal insults from a sibling. I reached out to her thru phone calls/emails, she has shut me out of her life. After 10 days of feeling guilty, angry and sad, I found this book. It confirmed my feelings and gave me the steps to accepting a possible permanent loss and the possibility of reconciliation. What was most helpful was the stories of others (including the author), questions to examine my responsibility in the rift, examples of how to still have this person in my life by shifting my thinking and reactions, how to create a "second" family, etc. Written with compassion, I highly recommend this book.