Customer Reviews

The Wounded Woman

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The reader from Houston would be advised to start thinking about the teachings of this book while she's doing her laundry. She might then find it deeper and more satisfying than her cursory reading of it implies. If it's true that the best books lead us onto other books, then this one passes the test with great generosity: I have already compiled an expanded reading (and film viewing) list from its pages. But it's more than that - a way for a woman to look at herself and the patterns of her life with a balance of emotion and detachment. It does not give easy and quick-fix solutions to what are, after all, heart-wrenching and ingrained problems, but a way towards transformation, towards breaking the negative patterns. On my first reading this book nearly broke me with its clear insights and wise compassion. How could a woman I don't know, half a world away, know so much about me? But it gave me the motivation to dig deeper and wider, and the eyes to see not only myself, my relationship with my father and with men, my creativity, but also my mother, my sisters, my friends. The use of myth - in fairy-tales, legends, novels and films - lends a strong intellectual framework to the book without sacrificing the emotional content, while the author's clinical experience and anecdotes from her own life places it firmly in the lives of real women. The author has done what many men say women cannot do: widen the perspective to embrace the large picture as well as zoom in on the details. I can't recommend this book enough, to men as well as women. Intelligent, perceptive, and emotionally mature.

Leonard writes of the wounds of fathers and how they wound daughters. I found this book illuminating for my own understanding of my self and my father. It helped me to develop compassion for my father and it helped me to move out of my own wounding. I recommend this book for any woman searching to understand the source of her angst

What I loved about this book was that unlike so many other books on father-daughter relationships this one did not oversimplify. Too many other books try to blame the father or blame the daughter and to squeeze us all into clear, but inaccurate roles. Linda Schierse Leonard recognizes that we are not always the same, that we are all actors as well as acted upon, and helps make our choices and their consequences clear. Brava!

I discovered this book after seeing it recommended in May Sarton's At Seventy. She admired Leonard's courage "in talking frankly about her relation to her father and combining her insights learned from patients (she is a psychotherapist) with her experience." Sarton said the book spoke to her with great force. The author uses fairy tales to make some of her points.
Many women suffer from overweight, depression, harmful relationships, drug or alcohol dependency, or anxiety. The author traces much of this to the wounded relationship with the father. Actions that harm the father/daughter relationship include the father's inability to show love, alcoholism, drug addiction, abuse, divorce, abandonment or absence.

I tried everything to heal the riff between my father & myself. This book really lent a hand. We are all responsible for our healings but books like this are guideposts along the way. It definitely wetted my appetite for more. This book got me started. It was gentle enough just when I needed it most. There are others out there to sock you in the eye. But most people who have been abused cannot handle being punched another time. Gentle persuasion, & loving kindness are the key to really good healing.

This book approaches healing the father-daughter relationship in an academic manner. It is helpful for those who work with women damaged by dysfunctional relationships with their fathers, but its academic approach may leave abused daughters seeking comfort and solutions disatisfied. Women seeking to heal their souls from the pain inflicted by their relationship with their fathers would find more hope and concrete skills for healing by reading some of the powerful memoirs by women who have survived and transcended difficult childhoods particularly "It Stops with Me" by Charleen Touchette, "The Color Purple" by Alice Waters, and "Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You" by Sue William Silverman. Of the three, "It Stops with Me" is the most recent addition to the literature of healing from the father-daughter relationship, and the most hopeful. The Author's courage to leave her culture behind to escape her father and her determination to create a better family life for her children is inspirational. Readers will find that "It Stops with Me" is a catalyst that will give them the strength to tell their own stories and begin their healing.

This book is written about an interesting topic, I think, that many people would be interested in, since, you know, half the population is female and has a father. No matter what the person's relationship to their father, be it good or bad, I think this book is insightful, because even in a good relationship, there are shadows and undercurrents and spoken or unspoken negotiations. I think this book is particularly interesting right now, as well, as the culture of the United States seems to have returned to a male oriented, and non-reflective perspective, and seems to have some sort of amnesia that at other times, people were at least trying to listen to "female" perspectives as well, and that these perspectives had credibility. Although this book is written from a sort of Jungian archetypal perspective, which can seem sort of limiting at times, at least it assures that there is or could be a female archetype for this relationship, and to me, there is such little information anyway that ever covered this topic, that it is helpful anyway. I want to keep it on my bookshelf until there is some kind of re-movement towards a more positive direction, politically, economically, and socially for women in the United States.

I came to this book looking for additional support and guidance on how to improve my relationships with men after losing my dad to an incurable form of cancer when I was 10 years old. I have had to really struggle through this book past descriptions of women with very broken relationships with their fathers. I was referred to this book and my understanding is it would cover women who have lost their father's through death at an early age as well as women who's fathers are abusive or alcoholic, etc. Instead, it is mostly a series of reading about women's dreams about their abusive or absentee father's who are alive but not in their lives.

There is a section on the two types of women one eventually grows into as forms of coping mechanisms and those descriptions have been helpful as well as seeing the role of one's mother in these scenarios. Other than that, I have told people I don't recommend it. We haven't all experienced abandonment as a result of a deadbeat father. Do not buy this if you lost a parent through death as it will likely leave you feeling colder than those difficult days reconciling being an adult woman who had no guidance from a father figure through no fault of their own.

This book is based on Jungian ideas and it is very easy to apply the descriptions of styles women take on to cope and good ideas on how to use these coping mechanisms in a healthier way.

This book was recommended by a friend and I'm so glad that it was. I'm not aware of many books out there that specifically touch on the father daughter dilemna and found myself identifying on so many levels with the patterns and roles described in this work. The awareness of this allowed me to face some of these aspects and work to transcend them.