Carefrontation
Arlene Drake
With more than thirty years of experience, Dr. Arlene Drake writes a guide for those desperately in need of a way to break free from the pain of childhood abuse and reclaim their lives.
When confronted with an abused child, our first impulse is to drop everything and provide comfort, get him or her out of danger, and find out what the hell is going on at home. It’s obvious that the child is helpless, in trouble, and need protection. Parents or not, we instinctively know what to do: We take care of the child.
But what if the child is you?
Active and directive, Carefrontation is filled with exercises and the simple, effective tools Dr. Drake has used successfully with her own clients for more than three decades. It lays out a powerful way to repair the damage of childhood abuse and its lasting effects, by teaching you what your parents couldn’t: an invaluable set of skills and practices that will give you the resources to live as a healthy, happy adult.
With the clear path this book provides, you can finally acknowledge that the suffering and the pain can stop. The destructive patterns can end. You can graduate, at last, into a life beyond “abuse victim” and for the first time take the power back from your abusers and finally be at peace.
With more than three decades of experience, Arlene Drake is a pioneer in the field of childhood abuse and trauma recovery. She has long been a passionate crusader for victims’ rights. She was instrumental in helping launch a precedent-setting 1989 case, Mary Doe vs. John Doe, in which the 6th District Court of Appeal ruled that abuse victims could sue their abusers after the standard statute of limitations had passed, if their memories of the childhood abuse (or understanding of its effects) surfaced in adulthood. The Mary Doe decision and the legal shifts that it catalyzed made it possible for people abused as children, such as those coming forward in the Catholic Church priest-abuse scandals, to seek redress in adulthood.