Thaw - Freedom from Frozen Feelings (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781466456402)

THAW - Freedom from Frozen Feelings, is a book about the emotional wounds of abandonment, shame, and contempt created by growing up in a less-than-nurturing family. If you experience abandonment issues, emotional flooding, toxic shame, or a pattern of dysfunctional relationships, or you help people who do, THAW - Freedom from Frozen Feelings is a "must have".

• The wounding process experienced by those who were raised in a less-than-nurturing family
• How those emotional wounds show up in various personal and interpersonal problems in adulthood
• An innovative, easy-to-understand, integrated model of addiction, codependency, enabling relationships, Adult/Child Syndrome,
• How fear of abandonment, toxic shame, and contempt for self or others are created by trauma and attachment wounds
• Subsequent books in the Thawing the Iceberg Series focus on specific manifestations of emotional wounds from childhood and how they impact on adult lives and relationships

Moderate-to-severe cases of abandonment come from situations in which the child does not fully or consistently get their emotional dependency needs to be met such as when the child lives in a shame-based family system. In such families, the children get messages of disapproval through constant criticism rather than messages of approval and warmth. A shame-based family system is characterized by the parent's use of shame to provide direction.

When parents do not meet the needs of their children it is not usually because the parents don't love them. I say 'usually' because there are those cases that one cannot understand, accept, explain, or excuse for any reason. But most parents do the best they can, given the internal and external resources they possess, to take care of their children. In fact, I cannot count the times I have heard parents say "I try hard to make sure my kids have it better than I did." This speaks very loudly to me. It says that these parents are familiar with unmet dependency needs.

So, most often it is not the parent's lack of love or effort that is to blame. Wounded people wound people!

THAW - Freedom from Frozen FeelingsTable of Contents:

- Chapter 1: "What the hell is wrong with you?" Motivation, Dependency Needs, Iceberg Model

- Chapter 2: Anatomy of an Emotional Wound Abandonment, Shame, & Contempt - The False Self

- Chapter 3: The Art of Survival External Focus, Impression Management - The Invented Self

- Chapter 4: Who am I Really? Imperfect World & Spirituality - The True Self

- Chapter 5: Distractions & Dependencies Addictions, Obsessions/Compulsions, and Other Issues

- Chapter 6: Codependency & Control Drama Triangle, Punish/Forgive, Enabling, Distance & Pursuit

- Chapter 7: Creating Frozen Feeling-States Fight-Flight-or-Freeze and the Figure 8

- Chapter 8: Meeting the Family-of-Self, Ego-States, and the Wounded Inner Children

- Chapter 9: Homeostasis & Hitting Bottom Reaching Out, Resistance, & Relapse

- Chapter 10: The Tip of the Iceberg First things First, Networks of Addiction, Signs of Addiction

- Chapter 11: Developing a Safe Container Letting Go of Codependency & Turning the Focus Inward

- Chapter 12: Thawing Frozen Feeling-States Rewiring the Brain, Logical Levels, Neural Nets & the 12-Steps

- Chapter 13: Pathways of Ongoing Recovery