Gifts From A Challenging Childhood: Creating A Practice for Becoming Your Healthiest Self

by Jan Bergstrom

When I was four and a half years old, I found my mother passed-out on her bedroom floor. She had overdosed—shortly after giving birth to my baby brother, and she went on to spend six months in a psychiatric hospital. On one of the many days she was away, I remember sitting in the backseat of our car with my older brother as my father drove us to the store, when suddenly our car collided head-on with another vehicle. I was too young to understand everything happening at the time, but, in the months that followed, I became parentless for a span of time that seemed like years. That experience set the stage for a lifelong interest in the impacts of childhood trauma. It also sparked my passion for healing others. 

Today, based on the model created by best-selling author and trauma expert Pia Mellody (Facing Co-dependence ©2003), I share with you, Gifts from a Challenging Childhood: Creating a Practice for Becoming Your Healthiest Self. In these pages, you will: 

• Learn and adopt 5 Core Practices for healthy living
• Cultivate a framework for your functional adult Self
• Gain clarity about your family-of-origin history
• Reparent your historically hurt places
• Speak your truth, and learn to have your own back
• Gather and use resources to help you heal from childhood trauma 

”In Gifts from a Challenging Childhood, author Jan Bergstrom describes with empathy and clarity the exact emotional, intellectual and neurological ways that children’s brains respond to trauma, and how the impact of that experience endures in the child’s life throughout adulthood.  Bergstrom explains how our basic needs as children for love, protection, validation and expression must be met by our parents; and how, when these needs are not met in childhood, we can end up with one-up or one-down self-esteem and over-protective or under-protective boundaries as adults.  In-depth descriptions of supportive, therapeutic techniques abound in this book, from mindfulness to grounding to writing a letter to yourself.  Whether you experienced traumatic neglect or excessive control and enmeshment at the hands of your parents, this book will not only help you identify what went wrong for you, it will also provide you with validating, supportive and compassionate ways to reparent yourself.”

Jonice Webb, PhD
Bestselling author of Running On Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect and Running On Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships.

“Jan's book is a precious guide to untangling the complications and difficulties many of us have in our adult lives, arising from traumatic childhoods.  Read it, underline it, take it with you on your personal journey.  This book will bring you home.” 

Nick Morgan.
President of Public Words, Inc, a communications consulting company, and author of Can You Hear Me? How to Communicate with People in a Virtual World.

“The devastating consequences of childhood trauma for the individual, families, and society at large are far-reaching, and cannot be overestimated. Jan Bergstrom’s new work builds beautifully on Pia Mellody's Post Induction Therapy model, offering hope and a detailed path forward for healing childhood wounds and living an authentic and empowered life.”

Vicki Tidwell Palmer
Author of Moving Beyond Betrayal: The 5-Step Boundary Solution for Partners of Sex Addicts

Genres: Psychology, Self Help, Nonfiction, Counselling

360 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 21, 2019

Reviews

[Nersi Nikakhtar · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book at the recommendation of a provider (who admittedly had only read part of it), so I read it in its entirety to get a better sense of it as a resource. This author's work is almost entirely beholden to the work of the author's mentor, Pia Mellody, enough so that the author refers to Mellody's work relentlessly (over 100 mentions in the text itself), almost to the point of exclusion of citing other sources (the author does cite some others, often colleagues, but this is sparing). This prostration to and overreliance on the works of someone with whom the author has a close relationship is at best derivative but frequently comes off as biased pandering to Mellody (who, not surprisingly, wrote the foreword), particularly as almost all of the evidence here is anecdotal. The author's other biases also frequently come through, from the frequent referral to religious themes and the "divine" (which the author tries, only somewhat successfully, to mitigate by calling it a "higher purpose" in later chapters) to the more concerning assumption that every reader's family has two married parents, one father and one mother (the author acknowledges this is not always the case only once). The author also views most family dynamics as polar dichotomies and frequently oversimplifies dynamics in an effort to fit people and behaviors into the categories the author has provided (again often from Mellody's work) without addressing the complexity and nuances. The exercises and reflections the author provides later have some reasonable bases in thought, primarily based on self esteem and self compassion. However, many of the activities are fairly generic and common, such as broad mindfulness and gratitude journaling, and these techniques are covered better in other works. There is also a frequent promise that doing a specific simple activity alone will effect substantial change and growth, not fully acknowledging the long, hard work that is often necessary in addressing childhood trauma. The book can be useful to a specific audience, particularly one for whom these concepts of self compassion and mindfulness are new concepts and are regarding this author's work as new ideas, especially if they are hoping for a promise of something that can be done quickly and immediately. Others, however, would be better served with other resources that are better researched and have more reliable evidence.

[LaQuisha Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This part hit home today:

“Embarrassment is an emotion that leaves us feeling exposed but tells us that we have gone too far with a certain behavior… like saying something you shouldn’t have when your containing boundary wasn’t quite contained.”

[Gracewellworn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Practical steps, greater depth and insights for anyone who has had a challenging childhood. For those of us that have benefited from Pia Melody's work- this is an excellent resource.

[Puciu Mihaela cristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

O carte care îmbină armonios teoria cu tehnicile de lucru pe trauma în dezvoltare.

[Debbie Corson · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some good practices in the book but it was over the top on blaming parents for everything wrong in your life.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful and important book from a friend of mine for anyone who has suffered a difficult childhood and wants to heal in order to live better in the present. Jan's mantra is "I am enough, and I matter." That seems so simple -- and yet many, many children (and adults) struggle to achieve that basic expression of self-worth. Much pain might be healed, or avoided, if everyone would work through the exercises and the thinking in this book.

Here are five practices she recommends:

Healthy Self‑Esteem – Replace one‑up/one‑down patterns from childhood by grounding identity in self-worth, not roles

Boundaries – Learn to set limits that both protect and allow connection, correcting over- or under-protective tendencies

Clarity of Self – Understand personal history, patterns, and triggers, then connect with an authentic sense of self
Self‑Care – Commit to nourishing practices in mind, body, spirit—to build regenerative routines .

Moderation – Move away from extremes, toward balance, ease, and integrated living .

[Michelle Harwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Useful for anyone who has had a difficult childhood, all mental health clinicians, and any primary care clinicians who work with clients with high adverse childhood experience (ACE) scores

I love this work and this practice. This book allows those of us who have experienced difficult childhoods to tackle complex and deep emotions for tremendous personal growth. This growth is often contagious to significant others, and is invaluable for relationship building. I am a much stronger nurse practitioner, mom, wife, etc., thanks to this practice. While the book is useful for everyone, it is especially useful as a practice for both clinicians and their clients. I love the practical applications.