Own Your Life: How Our Wounds Become Our Gifts (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780692861851)

For everyone who's ever wanted their life to be different but feels like they're stuck in gear, Own Your Life explores how we can leverage adversity and move from crisis, challenge, or loss to a place of thriving in our lives.

There is no easy way out of pain yet we often think something is wrong if we find ourselves revisiting the same old stories with no new ending. We're told that if we just think happy thoughts, all will be well, and then feel like failures when it isn't. How then do we transform our narratives and embrace our strengths and weaknesses?

In Own Your Life, Lise Porter, a licensed psychotherapist and survivor of her mother's suicide, passionately asserts that when we fully own the ups and downs of our lives, our personal wounds actually become gifts that serve us and the world at large. Through thirty-five short narratives all dealing with specific themes and tools pertaining to transformation, Porter debunks stigmas associated with grief, loss, and trauma and shares insights that inform, inspire, and soothe- providing readers hope and teaching them how to metabolize adversity so they can tolerate, integrate, and transcend those experiences.

"I highly recommend 'Own Your Life' to all those who despair, struggling to overcome life's challenges. It is beautiful in its simplicity, profound in its wisdom." Mary D. Clark, Ph.D, Psychologist

"This is an ever useful book for all of us who live, grieve, love, cry and want to keep expressing our best."Michael Spatuzzi, DACM, L.Ac.

"Using her own tragic story to outline how we can recover from life's unbearable blows, Lise Porter models the tremendous courage it takes to do so, planting seeds of hope and meaning along the way. A must-read for anyone going through a rough time, 'Own Your Life' is a brave and captivating guidebook."Blair Glaser, MA, LCAT psychotherapist