“From Dysfunction to Resilience: A Good Road to Travel” (2023)

Your dysfunctional childhood may have actually changed your brain and body chemistry.

The chronic stress of growing up with a rageaholic, cruel, or deceitful parent — or overt abandonment — can affect your long-term biological functioning. But you can address childhood stress and learn to reconcile the past with the present while building a more resilient future.

This is a story about nuclear and extended family relationships: the good, bad, and dysfunctional. Why are certain members manipulative, malicious, and even sociopathic, often attempting to split family? Why do others exhibit integrity and treat members with love and respect? Still others are caught between integrity and weakness, struggling with being manipulated. All of us are affected by our childhood. Many emerge well adjusted. Some emerge fearful, angry, and lacking self-worth, with varying degrees of recovery.

This book will help you:

• Identify and recover from dysfunction and learn to live with the past.
• Build resilience, the ability to bounce back from tribulation and distress.
• Enhance emotional intelligence and improve relationships.
• Travel the continuous road of self-improvement, starting from wherever you find yourself now.■

[Tom Ersin has degrees in communications and counseling. He’s examined long-term dysfunction from both sides of the counselor-client relationship and from within his own nuclear and extended families.]