RELIQUARY The book that got me through 2015

I don't usually share personal stuff, but I think now is the time.

Yesterday, Reliquary, my latest adult novel, was published. It's an urban fantasy with hints of erotic romance, and writing it (and the other books in the series, all of which I wrote last year and will be published over the next few months) helped get me through one of the toughest periods in my life thus far.

I experienced four major life stressors in 2015. My marriage ended. I had to leave the job I'd had for ten years and dearly loved. I moved from the home I thought I'd grow old in. And one of my children was diagnosed with what will be a lifelong medical condition that requires constant monitoring and intervention (Type 1 diabetes). I am fortunate to have friends and family who love me dearly and support me unconditionally, but even so, I'm gonna be honest--I'm okay now, and much happier than I was, but there were times last year when I thought I was going to crater.

Reliquary was the story that came to me as I walked through the painful early days of 2015, and telling it carried me through the weeks and months that followed. The series is about Mattie, a woman who thinks she has the life she wants, and then is forced to choose between her safe, predictable small-town world and the much bigger, scarier, and less certain world of magic. Her decision does not occur in one moment--it is a process that plays out through the series--and although (sadly) I don't have special powers or Asa Ward in my real life, writing the books allowed me to work through some of my own decisions.

Maybe I'm not supposed to admit that. It's all about the story, right? It has to stand on its own. (I think it does. Also, Asa Ward.) But I think writing and reading are redemptive in so many ways--they offer us a safe place to to explore our feelings, to tread paths and live out choices we cannot (or might not yet), for whatever reason, experience in our everyday lives. They give us characters and events and dynamics to bounce off of, to hate or love, to embrace or push away. When stories work, they capture moments and emotions with such intensity that they slide under our skin and into our bloodstream.

I wrote Reliquary because I needed to. I had to. It is pure escape, dark and sexy and fun, yet more psychologically real than almost anything I've yet written.

I'm so happy I get to share it with you.

Mattie Carver’s engagement party should have marked the start of her own personal fairy tale. But when her fiancé, Ben, is violently abducted the next morning, her desperate quest to find him rips her away from small-town life and reveals a shattering truth: magic is real—and Ben is hooked. It’s not the stuff of storybooks. It’s wildly addictive, capable of producing everything from hellish anguish to sensual ecstasy almost beyond human endurance.

Determined to find out who took Ben and why, Mattie immerses herself in a shadowy underworld and comes face-to-face with the darkly alluring Asa Ward, a rogue magic dealer, infamous hustler…and her missing fiancé’s estranged brother. Asa has the power to sense magic, and he realizes Mattie is a reliquary, someone with the rare ability to carry magic within her own body, undetected. Asa agrees to help find Ben on one condition: Mattie must use her uncommon talent to assist his smuggling operations. Now, from magic-laced Vegas casinos to the netherworld clubs of Bangkok, Mattie is on a rescue mission. With Asa by her side, she’ll face not only the supernatural forces arrayed against her but the all-too-human temptation that she fears she can’t resist.

You should not have told me I can put GIFs on here

Just spent the last hour looking at the Bangor uni videos. Standard September night really. UCAS -> English Language -> Same courses I always look at -> Oh look the same unis -> Funny, I recognise that bedroom I'VE LOOKED AT IT SO MANY TIMES.

I seemed to finish my Personal Statement this morning. That was, er, weird.

No doubt it will get ripped to shreds by a trillion people before I submit it, but writing the last line felt good. I'm not stressed about uni really. What? What do you mean you don't believe me? Verging on mental breakdowns constantly? You've received 5 emails of distress from me? Oh.

Honestly though, September's been ace. I'm 18. EIGHTEEN!

Did somebody say September? I'm sure I heard that. It's not July is it? S e p t e m b e r? The Autumn month? Yes I thought so. SO WHY IS IT 30C today??? No am I not happy about this. I have a new coat. It's burgundy. It has a very furry hood and I look like an eskimo. LET ME LOOK LIKE AN ESKIMO. I'm sure I heard my legs screaming in horror at being let out into the light today. Gorgeous red leaves, newly fallen on the ground, were shouting, "BUT IT WAS MY TIME. MY TIME TO SHINE IS NOW. WHY AM I NOT CRUNCHING? HELP ME UP, FFS. GET ME BACK ON THAT TREE." Even the slugs fell victim to the chaos. Thinking everything was dark, wet, and cold. Poor souls. They're the ones all crunched up on the ground, not the leaves. The only ones getting away with this are the daddylonglegs. Gliding around like they own the effing place. Spiders I can deal with. But daddylonglegs unleash emotions and actions I never knew I had. 

So yeah being 18's involved going out A LOT. Going to pubs, clubs, parties, buying cigar...*fades to black and silence. head pops into shot, and body shuffles in* Hahahahahaahaha...oh, you thought I was SERIOUS?

I've been fangirling the hell out of Doctor Who, geeking out over Stephen Fry's Planet Word, adding copious amounts of books to my Amazon wishlist, and voicing the tripod in War Of The Worlds in French with my friends, consequently crying with laughter and doubling over in stomach pain. 

The only remotely 18 year oldish thing I've done is click "I am over 18" boxes on websites with TRUTH. My 18yo life > your 18yo life.  

AND, EXIT

Readers Therapists Disagree With Me

"Letters, we get letters

We get lots and lots of letters"

Yet another interesting letter came to me in response to my posts that make the recommendation to adult victims of abusive families that they find a therapist who can help them confront their abusive parents about the family dynamics in ways that get the parents to stop any ongoing dysfunctional interactions. 

A therapist actually fired the reader from his practice because the patient did not want to divorce her mother!

As I have said repeatedly, I never recommend that patients continueto be abused by their families. However, I do not think that divorcing your family is the only other option, and it is certainly not the best option. This is because, unfortunately, you continue to carry your parents around with you in your head for the rest of your life. 

Fear tracts and other tracts in the brain's limbic system that determine the way we all normally respond to the interpersonal environment - and that are highly resistant to fading away through the normal processes of neural plasticity - come from, and respond more strongly to, one's parents than to anything else in the environment. 

It does not take much parental contact at all to reinforce them - even once every few years might do it. Contact from other family members in which messages about the parents are provided also works quite nicely in this regard. In fact, anyone else who behaves in any way that is even somewhat analagous to the way the parents behave will also trigger and reinforce them - and the pathways are very powerful in shaping our usual behavior.

Even if you stop interacting with parents altogether, you are very likely to pass on repetitive dysfunctional interactions to your own children despite your best efforts. Often people go to the opposite extreme from their parents in the way they interact with their children, yet end up with kids with exactly the same problems, as described here. Other children from abusive or neglectful households decide never to have children themselves for fear that they might turn out acting just like their own parents.

As mentioned, divorcing a family and continuing to be abused are not the only two options. There is a third: the one I mentioned in the first paragraph above. It is certainly not an easy thing to accomplish, or patients would have done it themselves long ago. It takes a lot of patience and persistence. And doing it badly is worse than not doing it at all. Nonetheless, with one's family of origin members, where there is a will, there is a way.

Unfortunately, the majority of therapists these days do not really understand family dynamics at all, are unaware of the above risks involved in recommending a "divorce" from parents, and do not know the techniques for helping their patients overcome multiple resistances and invalidation from family members when the patients attempt to discuss family dynamics with parents in a constructive way.

Interestingly, just after a received the letter from the reader mentioned above and went on to answer it, I got an extremely nasty missive from a psychotherapist on this very subject. Perhaps it was even the reader's prior therapist. I mean, who knows? I won't mention the therapist's name, but she even signed it. The letter read:

As a therapist I can say you are an awful therapist; truly terrible. The best thing a person who has been abused as a child can do is get away from their parents, make peace with it. Suggesting that someone that has been abused, goes back to the abuser and does the work to try and repair damage is abusive and shocking. I am shocked.

This therapist apparently thinks patients who were abused as children are just too weak and damaged to stand up to their family members. How invalidating! That's probably what the abusive parents think of their adult child as well.

Anyway, here is the letter from the reader complaining about a therapist just like her. My answer is written below in amber color.

My parents abused me, physically, sexually and emotionally. As a result I

have a traumatic brain injury. I was put in foster care when I was 13. I am

now 35. I have gotten help. I am getting help still. My last therapist fired

me after I reconnected with my mother.

My mom has apologized and she has changed! It took awhile as in years but we now have a great relationship. I have a new therapist. I am scared because over Christmas I reconnected with my father who has also apologized and changed for the better. I have closure.

I have my family. I am scared that if I tell my therapist she is going to

freak on me, shame me, guilt me and or fire me. I am seeing her for help for

my own bad choices and the resulting trauma. I know she hates my family but I

don't understand how a therapist can tell me that I can change while insisting my family who they have never met can't [right on!]. It doesn't make any sense. I am not sure how to tell her.

I can't comment on your situation specifically without personally evaluating you and your family extensively, and without knowing a lot more about your experiences with your therapist, so the following are general comments that may or may not apply to you:

As you may have guessed from my blog, I am a firm advocate of my patients reconnecting with their families, even if the family had been abusive, as long as the abusive or invalidating behavior has been stopped and has been openly discussed by the involved parties, with the result that everyone has some idea of where the dysfunctional patterns came from and what purpose they had served. Before that goal has been accomplished, I coach my patients on how to get through the family’s often formidable defenses against having such conversations, so that they can get to that point.

Of course, I make sure that my patients have a safety plan for themselves (and their children if any) if this process starts to take a wrong turn, in which case we try to figure out what went wrong and how to get things back on track. I almost never give up. However, if a patient puts their child in danger (like leaving a young one with a grandfather who had sexually abused the patient as a child), we have to work on that issue first.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of therapists who still believe that divorcing one's family is the best course. My recommendation in such a case is to find another therapist. Unfortunately, therapists familiar with dysfunctional family dynamics are getting harder to find.

Also, if someone is afraid to be honest with their therapist, that in general ties the therapist’s hands, so there is almost no point in continuing. A good therapist may certainly question a patient’s decision but should never attack them personally for having made it.