Out of Ashes: Trauma, Betrayal, Triumph


Book Description

God has allowed me to finally live a fairytale's happily ever after. However, as you have probably guessed by now, my fairytale had some nightmares, villains, and a plot that was undesirable. It was a journey that caused me to question God and question my existence. In the beginning, I didn't quite understand how true the Word of God was. I thought that I was in complete control of my life, and believed that my destiny was in my hands. My plan and route to success was unquestionable. I did the right things and tried to treat people the way that I wanted to be treated. I knew that God loved me and that I had His favor. So, why wasn't everything perfect? Why was I given this plot, this path, this journey? One might say that our destiny is determined by God. Yes, God has a plan for us as the Word says in Jeremiah 29:11: "I alone know the plans I have for you, plans to bring you prosperity and not disaster, plans to bring about the future you hope for." That's the Word of God; but we have to receive, accept, and apply His plan, which is revealed in His Word, in order for it to become our destiny. Regardless of what it feels like or looks like, we have to will His plan into our lives. The Lord will not put His will above ours. The responsibility of our destiny is ultimately on us. I decided to take you on a journey through my story. This approach has really allowed me to unpack experiences, emotions, thoughts, and questions that lingered in my head. Prayerfully, by gaining insight into my personal journey, you will be able to identify subtle (and not so subtle) moves of God in your life.




God and Oprah


Book Description

"God and Oprah: Rising from the Ashes: Triumph After Trauma" is a gripping narrative that follows the journey of resilience and empowerment in the aftermath of a brutal assault. Through the eyes of the protagonist, Annie, readers are taken on an emotional rollercoaster as she confronts the darkest depths of despair and emerges stronger than ever. This empowering tale delves into the raw emotions of fear, shame, and despair that Annie experiences in the wake of her trauma. Yet, it also highlights her unwavering determination to reclaim her sense of self and find healing amidst the chaos. With each page, readers witness Annie's transformation from victim to survivor as she navigates the complexities of her emotions and confronts the societal stigma surrounding sexual assault. Supported by a network of compassionate allies and fueled by her own resilience, Annie embarks on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment. As she confronts her demons head-on and challenges the misconceptions that shroud survivors in shame, she discovers her inner strength and voice. Through advocacy and empowerment, she becomes a beacon of hope for others, proving that healing is possible even in the face of unimaginable pain. "God and Oprah: Rising from the Ashes: Triumph After Trauma" is a poignant reminder of the indomitable human spirit and the power of resilience to overcome even the darkest of moments. It is a story of hope, courage, and empowerment that will inspire readers to believe in their own ability to rise above adversity and reclaim their light.




From Trauma to Triumph


Book Description

FINDING LIBERTY: FROM TRAUMA TO TRIUMPH There’s nothing like the written Word of God for showing you the way to true liberty through faith in Jesus Christ. Through God’s Word we are created, mended, shaped and put back together for the purpose predestined for us. Let it equip and empower you to walk in liberty. Do not be so scared that you cannot envision the glory of a new beginning. Do not be so consumed by tests, trials, and trauma that you fail to grasp the glory of the coming triumph. Do not feel so condemned that you feel there is no redemption for you. Do not be so beaten down by the scourge of captivity that you jettison the glory of freedom. Do not allow the troubles of your past faze you or your present tribulations derail you. Forget the ugly truths – the unmentionable pains and the inconceivable hurts. Remember the reasons. Remember your dreams. Remember why you began the journey in the beginning. Remember the call of liberty. The call that told you, “You are more than this.” Remember the stirrings in your spirit for something more meaningful, more fulfilling, more enriching than the mediocre, mundane and ordinary existence that sapped your energy and dampened your spirit at the rising of the sun. We don’t get burned out because of what we do. We get burned out because we forget why we do the things we do. Whether you are jaded from past trauma, a present heartache, or a persistent feeling of rejection, self-doubt, the bitter sting of failure does not have to narrate your story. If you conclude that your best days are over – they are. If you think they’re ahead – they are. Regardless of the adversity that you face, regardless of how abysmal you think your situation is, you can face every day with enthusiasm. You can walk your way through trauma to triumph. All it requires is your faith. You can be everything you always dreamed of, soaring to the heights that always called out to you. You can dream again, journeying with uncertainty through the valley of rebirth - knowing that God is still in control. As you learn to cultivate the power within, you will come to the truth that you are broken to be blessed and that your liberty is guaranteed – as you transit from trauma to triumph. Graves become gardens and bones become armies. Ashes become beauty and seas becomes highways! The oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Heroes and victims both get knocked down by life’s circumstances. See yourself as a Hero that got back up, armed with faith and determined for purpose, instead of a victim that stayed down, defeated by fear. Be the Hero that creates a positive future from a broken past. Whether the captivity we experience is due to the actions of others or social circumstances, the captivity of physical infirmities, or that which we bring to ourselves by our own mindset, choices and attitude, the captivity of physical death comes to us all as a result of the fall of Adam. God offers liberty to all captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. Let this book “From Trauma to Triumph: Finding Liberty” uncover how God transforms a troubled past into a glorious destiny to illustrate that there is more in you than your history.




Building Beauty Out of Ashes


Book Description

What happens when you build your house on sand? In time, it will fall when the storms of life come crashing against it. My storm began when I heard the words, "I want a divorce." After those words were spoken, even more storms came crashing my way that brought betrayal and trauma with them. Watching the marriage and family I had built fall apart was a storm I was unprepared for. Does God allow storms to come into our lives? The answer is yes because the storm has a purpose, and there is always something new to be built after the storm. My journey of inner healing and deliverance began the moment the foundation of my marriage was destroyed. Although all I saw was ashes and rubble around me, God was calling me into a journey of building beauty out of the ashes of my pain. My journey of emotional healing from divorce, emotional trauma, and betrayal have been about finding my true identity as a daughter of God. In the chapters of this book, I share my experience of rebuilding after my divorce and the purpose behind the pain. God's love for family and marriage has brought me on a journey of healing, restoration, and forgiveness. He has called me to stand for my family and to believe and trust in Him to repair everything that was destroyed. Whatever journey you find yourself on, it is time to rebuild God's way.




Psychoanalysts, Psychologists and Psychiatrists Discuss Psychopathy and Human Evil


Book Description

Evil - along with its incarnation in human form, the psychopath - remains underexamined in the psychological and psychoanalytic literature. Given current societal issues ranging from increasingly violent cultural divides to climate change, it is imperative that the topics of psychopathy and human evil be thoughtfully explored. The book brings together social scientists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts to discuss the psychology of psychopaths, and the personal, societal and cultural destruction they leave as their legacy. Chapters address such questions as: Who are psychopaths? How do they think and operate? What causes someone to commit psychopathic acts? And are psychopaths born or created? Psychopaths leave us shocked and bewildered by behavior that violates the notions of common human trust and bonding, but not all psychopaths commit crimes. Because of their unique proclivities to deceive, seduce, and dissemble, they can hide in plain sight; especially when intelligent and highly educated. This latter group comprise the "successful or corporate" psychopaths, frequently found in boardrooms of corporations and among leaders of national movements or heads of state. Addressing a wide range of topics including slavery, genocide, the Holocaust, the individual as psychopath, the mind of the terrorist, sexual abuse, the role of attachment and the neurobiology of psychopathy, this book will appeal to researchers of human evil and psychopathy from a range of different disciplines and represents essential reading for psychotherapists and clinical psychologists.




The Culture of Defeat


Book Description

Focusing on three seminal cases of military defeat--the South after the Civil War, France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany following World War I--Wolfgang Schivelbusch reveals the complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations to the experience of loss on the battlefield. Drawing on reactions from every level of society, Schivelbusch charts the narratives defeated nations construct and finds remarkable similarities across cultures. Eloquently and vibrantly told, The Culture of Defeat is a brilliant and provocative tour de force of history.




Baroque Bodies


Book Description

Mitchell Greenberg explores the significance of fantasies of the body in seventeenth-century France through provocative and subtle readings of some of the most intriguing texts of the period. Beginning with an eloquent invocation of the status of the king in classical France, Greenberg surveys the complex sociopolitical history of Louis XIV's reign, analyzing both Moliere and the entire corpus of Racine. The central chapters of Baroque Bodies deal with such fascinating texts as the Memoires of the abbe de Choisy (the first existing account of a male cross-dresser); two founding texts of the modern pornographic genre, L'ecole des filles and L'academie des dames; and the "autobiography" of Marie de l'Incarnation, the famous "mystic" and founder of the first Ursuline convent in Canada. In addition to his richly nuanced readings, Greenberg integrates into his argument material from a broad array of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, feminism, epistemology, and history. He also points out the implications of his argument for the political, theological, and historical thought of the period, moving effortlessly from witch trials in France to discussions of bodies in Renaissance English literary criticism to the works of Bakhtin, Foucault, Freud, and Lacan.




At Penpoint


Book Description

In At Penpoint Monica Popescu traces the development of African literature during the second half of the twentieth century to address the intertwined effects of the Cold War and decolonization on literary history. Popescu draws on archival materials from the Soviet-sponsored Afro-Asian Writers Association and the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom alongside considerations of canonical literary works by Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Ousmane Sembène, Pepetela, Nadine Gordimer, and others. She outlines how the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union played out in the aesthetic and political debates among African writers and intellectuals. These writers decolonized aesthetic canons even as superpowers attempted to shape African cultural production in ways that would advance their ideological and geopolitical goals. Placing African literature at the crossroads of postcolonial theory and studies of the Cold War, Popescu provides a new reassessment of African literature, aesthetics, and knowledge production.




Homesickness


Book Description

Introducing a posthumanist concept of nostalgia to analyze steadily widening themes of animality, home, travel, slavery, shopping, and war in U.S. literature after 1945 In the Anthropocene, as climate change renders environments less stable, the human desire for place underscores the weakness of the individual in the face of the world. In this book, Ryan Hediger introduces a distinctive notion of homesickness, one in which the longing for place demonstrates not only human vulnerability but also intersubjectivity beyond the human. Arguing that this feeling is unavoidable and characteristically posthumanist, Hediger studies the complex mix of attitudes toward home, the homely, and the familiar in an age of resurgent cosmopolitanism, especially eco-cosmopolitanism. Homesickness closely examines U.S. literature mostly after 1945, including prominent writers such as Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, and Ernest Hemingway, in light of the challenges and themes of the Anthropocene. Hediger argues that our desire for home is shorthand for a set of important hopes worth defending—serious and genuine relationships to places and their biotic regimes and landforms; membership in vital cultures, human and nonhuman; resistance to capital-infused forms of globalization that flatten differences and turn life and place into mere resources. Our homesickness, according to Hediger, is inevitable because the self is necessarily constructed with reference to the material past. Therefore, homesickness is not something to dismiss as nostalgic or reactionary but is rather a structure of feeling to come to terms with and even to cultivate. Recasting an expansive range of fields through the lens of homesickness—from ecocriticism to animal studies and disability studies, (eco)philosophy to posthumanist theory—Homesickness speaks not only to the desire for a physical structure or place but also to a wide range of longings and dislocations, including those related to subjectivity, memory, bodies, literary form, and language.




The Longing


Book Description

Mary Earle’s memoir, The Longing, is a poignant testament to resilience, born out of a desire to shed light on a dark chapter of history that mirrors her own turbulent past. Born in 1947, Mary’s childhood was overshadowed by a dysfunctional family and a father known for his explosive temper. A harrowing incident at fifteen plunged Mary into a world rife with abuse and suffering, threatening to lead her down a path of despair and depression. Her father forbid her to ever speak of this incident, and it becomes locked inside her. Yet, Mary’s spirit remained unbroken. Her story is one of remarkable transformation. In her forties, having escaped a violent marriage, Mary embarked on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment, travelling solo to India. Today, she stands as a beacon of hope and strength, a counsellor and trauma specialist, healer and clairvoyant dedicated to helping others. With an ‘eternally optimistic’ outlook, Mary shares her journey in The Longing, not just as a tale of survival, but as a source of inspiration and courage for anyone striving to overcome their own adversities.