"The emotionally absent mother" by Jasmin lee cori

[Fightsong]

By Jasmin lee cori. I'm reading this. It's lovely. Very gentle. And very positive. Does not frame things as PD, but explores many of the usual themes.  Has ideas for healing, lots about inner child stuff, and takes the long view. I am liking it, and almost feel the authors empathy off the page.

[Irish-Molly]

Thanks, I'm going to look on Amazon!

[hellobliss123]

I really enjoyed this book.

[all4peace]

I just finished this book. It is excellent in so many ways--overviews of what is needed from our mothers, what it looks like when it's missing, how that affects us as children and adults, how to start filling in the gaps, how to find the Good Mother from partners, therapists, friends. I highly recommend this book.

[GettingOOTF]

Thank you. I'm adding this to my list.

[LightOrb]

I've been crying since I bought it a few hours ago. I am described there, and it's so painful. Not because of my M, I am not crying for her anymore and perhaps that's also very sad. I am crying because I did not deserve this. How much suffering could I have avoided if I'd known this 17 years ago.

[RavenLady]

I appreciated this book for several reasons, and I do have one caveat.

I appreciated its gentleness. It's well written. When I read it I was not ready to see my parents as PD and this book did not require me to. It focused instead on what I wasn't getting, rather than what Mom was doing. I appreciated that.

Another book in a similar vein that I read second to this one is "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal From Distant, Rejecting or Self-Involved Parents," by Lindsay Gibson. I felt more comfortable with the style of this one but it might also be that Cori's book was kind of a shocker and I had to ease into some of these concepts.

My caveat is that I found the treatment of gender in Cori's book to be pretty rigid. I don't think there was any mention of how men can provide the nurturing role instead of women, nor allowance for same-sex couples nor genderqueer folks as parents. I was hoping the treatment of these issues would be more modern or at least acknowledge that healthy kids can and do result from "nontraditional" families.