BECOMING AN EMPOWERED SURVIVOR

Jones offers a memoir of her recovery from the effects of traumatic events in her youth and teenage years.

The Texas-based author, a former forensic accountant,has written this book, she says, “so that I can teach others about the power of healing and the joy and love available when anyone chooses to heal.” She tells the story of her long marriage to her husband, Tristan, and their life moving from town to town in Texas and Colorado while caring for their serval cats; she also tells of her time in Hong Kong between 2016 and 2022, where she led a team of accountants. (Some names in the book have been changed, according to the author.) Gradually, with the help of a hypnotherapist, a trauma therapist, and a support group, she came to terms with memories of being sexually abused by a boy in high school and of experiencing abuse at the hands of her grandfather when she was a little girl. “For forty-five years—despite repeated attempts at unsuccessful couch therapy over the twenty-five years before hypnotherapy…I never put it together,” she writes of her time before her breakthrough. She was especially surprised at this difficulty, she says, because she’s “a natural-born problem-solver.” In the latter portions of the memoir, she tells of how she turned to astrology and notions of reincarnation to flesh out her story: “People we encounter each lifetime,” she writes, “are at various places in their soul’s journey toward enlightenment.”

Jones writes with a tone of openness and sincerity throughout this memoir. The most compelling parts of the work are when she links her recovery journey to broader issues of personal resilience: Her strong assertion that victims of abuse can overcome emotional injuries and live full lives is a bright thread running through the narrative, and she’s refreshingly candid about the setbacks that she faced on her own journey. She vividly compares her experience to peeling an onion: “As you peel, you sting from the burn and intense reality of what you discover,” she writes. “You stumble sometimes, taking steps backward to cope with the burn.” Some readers may find that some parts of the book could have used more clarification; at one point, for example, she writes that when a local city council made a decision forcing her and her husband to leave town with their servals (“never in my life had I experienced as much hatred directed at me as during those months”), the author goes on to say that they “literally had to move…overnight.” However, what happed next is unclear, because she writes that the place where she and her spouse chose to move “wasn’t ready for us and all the animals we would eventually accumulate there.” Such moments aside, though, her highly personal explanation of various aspects of trauma, such as triggers (“Though the backward steps can knock the wind out of us,” she writes, “they bring opportunities to evolve our healing”) make for an affecting remembrance.

A powerfully personal account of using therapy to boldly move forward in life.