This Blog post is inviting you to read about multi-generational trauma in the promised novel from me, You Were My Mother. It is now listed on my Resource page under Books, contemporary fiction.
The cover was designed to illustrate how trauma can shatter the equilibrium of a family. It can and will wreak havoc on one’s assumptive world. What is that? Our assumptive world is what we count on to be true about our loved ones and our lives. It refers also to what we believe will be possible for our future.
I did not set out to write a novel. It was not one of my aspirations, even though writing is a bit of a family passion and I had great interest in writing poetry and essays as a young person. My affinity for delivering a message through essay writing is now expressed in these Blogs. I was inspired to write about trauma in fictional form by a dream I had which contained the germ of an interesting plot. Every piece of fiction starts with the question What If? My dream proposed a what if? having to do with a privileged woman who seemed to have everything, until a cascading set of circumstances set her on a trajectory she never wanted or expected.
My novel opens with a quote from Dante’s Inferno. This quotation refers to the good that can be found in what, in spiritual parlance, is called the Dark Night of the Soul. When we are forced to grapple with personal or family trauma, it is not our mind that will help bring us to the other side of the abyss. Healing is to be found at the Soul level, that part of us so often taken for granted or even denied and ignored.
Soul level healing is the principal theme of this novel and the thrust of my work as a Chaplain and Intuitive Coach. When we take a deep dive into the soul level, purpose and meaning are the treasures we find therein. I chose to write You Were My Mother from the point of view of both a mother and a daughter, experiencing the same family trauma but with vastly different vantage points. This is what happens in real life in families and healing does not occur through identical tools or with the same helpful professionals.
Inspired is by definition to be filled with Spirit. Believe me, I could not have reached the point where I deliver this finished work to you without bottomless inspiration, from both divine and human sources. Again, I invite you to read this novel to learn, and hopefully enjoy, how the dark night can transform into soul level healing.