Customer Reviews

Rebuilding the Garden: Healing the Spiritual Wounds of Childhood Sexual Assault

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Rebuilding the Garden dealt concretely with my issues of alienation and isolation from spirit, and my feelings of abandonment by God while the assaults took place.

I look back on the many years of psychotherapy I've had and now realize why it felt incomplete. Without addressing the spiritual component of the molest, I hadn't looked at the WHOLE experience.

The exercises were easy to follow and the process got easier with each try. Rather than run from the memories that came up, I was able to use McLaren's example of working with the underlying emotions to heal my energetic and spiritual boundaries. I felt energized and more powerful afterward...less like a mere "survivor" and more of a determined, focused guardian of my own spirit.

McLaren's use of humor and wit throughout the book made the work much easier. It was like I had a close friend and companion there with me, someone who eased my discomfort. Her compassion and understanding is evident throughout the book. She took obvious care not to use graphic or triggering information, unlike many of the other books I've read. Maybe other authors don't understand how traumatizing those sorts of things can be. Without all the stories about other people's pain I was more able to look at and heal my own. I am forever grateful for McLaren's encouraging example. I now feel able to heal my molest experience on the spiritual level and move forward with my life.

I strongly recommend the book for anyone who has felt like their healing was incomplete.

If you're trying to heal from an deep wound of the spirit, this is a wonderful book. It is not a literal read, you have to take the concepts and ideas and make them yours, but in doing so you'll achieve the same goal as the author. I particularly appreciated the authors's treatment of anger. I applaud Karla Mclaren for sharing her experience. THere's a lot of life truth in these pages.

This is my first time writing a book review, even though I've bought so many books from amazon, but I just had to write this out. I just started doing the meditations featured this book in January of this year after buying CDs from Dynamic Ease Healing Center in Chicago made by Kerry Sammon. I also attended the weekly meditations at Dynamic Ease. In addition, I just finished a meditation workshop during the weekend of June 11th, 12th and 13th of 2010 at a place called InVision in Chicago which also featured the meditation exercises Karla wrote about in this book. I'd been reading through Karla's book since the beginning of this year. I found Karla's book to be a beautiful gift from God, but I found that I greatly benefitted from doing the meditations in a group setting with the assistance of the instructors at InVision. Let me say here and now that this book and the exercises contained within it is what I've needed all of my life. I was raped from the age of seven until the age of ten by a cousin. I stayed in an abusive marriage for 13 years. I've worked as a psychiatric nurse where four people on staff committed suicide. I was not prepared to cry as much as I did this weekend when I did the meditation exercises featured in this book. I told my meditation instructor this weekend, "My eyes keep tearing when I do these meditations. Why is that?" He said, "You are letting go of a lot of stored pain." I hadn't realized I'd stored any pain, but I guess I had. I'd had years of psychotherapy, even EMDR therapy, which I found extremely successful, but these modalities only went so far. I learned how to be functional in my daily life. This was needed, I hadn't completely released the pain or reclaimed my soul in the process. Aside from helping me to release pain and reclaim my soul, the exercises featured in Karla's book were also good for placing me "into a flow," so to speak. They helped me to attract different and more spiritually balanced people and circumstances to myself because literally my soul was in a higher vibratory place. I sincerely thank the author for writing the book.

As a Bay Area psychological counselor who speaks Spanish, I found this book offered unique approaches for clients who have suffered the wounds of childhood trauma. Although it is titled for sexual assault, it offers healing and safety for most anyone who requires it. Some of the approaches are almost working from a point of practiced dissociation. Ie. Building the space of a living room behind your eyes - and then seeing from the safety of that newly created living space. Having worked with many clients who commit self harm, are suicidal, delusional, or actively cutting - this book has had even a handful pages that were appropriate for my client's struggles. Ie- meditations and guided tours through a felt world, the creation of a sanctuary, rebuilding the sacredness and sanctity of a particular aspect of the self and on and on. The book is a bundle of goodness, weather you practice what it offers or not. For the survivors (sometimes victims) of childhood sexual assault that I have worked with - they have often been too young to benefit from this work. My reading this book though, helps me understand and believe that the spiritual wounds within the garden can be re-built.

I had expected a somewhat more detailed and in depth approach of the damage done to the soul and spirit of sexual abuse victims. Instead, the author focuses mainly on energetic approaches to heal the soul and describes the damage to the soul in those terms. Ofcourse it is hard to differentiate between soul, mind and feelings in conceptual terms yet I had hoped it would have done more so. A psychology of the soul beyond energetic terms would be very worthwhile. Nevertheless, I personally value any approach that attempts to dig deeper, beyond that which we already know, for which I applaud the author.

This book is an extremely valuable tool to help move past the trauma. The exercises are simple, easy to understand, invisible (so you can do them anytime you need them) and profound. I cannot say enough good things!