Author: Paul Hegstrom, PhD. 

ISBN: 10: 0-8341-2251-0  ISBN 13:  978-0-8341-2251-2           

Paul Hegstrom was a violent, abusive man.  He abused his wife, Judy, for 17 years, then abandoned and divorced her and their children.  He continued his escalating pattern of abuse with successive relationships until he had beaten a woman so badly that he was forced to get help.  The alternative was to face prosecution for attempted murder.

Recovery and counseling helped Hegstrom see that his problems were his.  He could no longer shift the blame to others.  God, through the Spirit and the Bible, helped Hegstrom see why he was abusive and helped him change from the inside out.  Along the way, Paul and Judy reconciled and remarried and their family began to heal.  Paul earned a PhD in marriage and family therapy and the Hegstroms founded Life Skills, International, an organization to help families like theirs.

In Broken Children, Grown-Up Pain, Hegstrom explains how trauma affects pre-adolescent children.  Prior to puberty, children do not have the neurochemistry or biological maturity to process events cognitively.  Trauma arrests emotional development; present and future events are processed in relationship to the trauma and in a way that was normal at the age the trauma occurs.  Hegstrom says the five traumas most likely to arrest development are rejection, incest, emotional abuse and physical abuse.  Of the five, rejection is by far the most damaging.

Hegstrom then explains how arrested emotional development plays out in adolescence, single adulthood, dating, marriage and work.  He shows how we can change—how to rewire our brains so that our cognitive choices, not our past traumas, determine our behavior.

Broken Children, Grown-Up Pain is an accessible, helpful book for those who are dealing with the effects of childhood trauma and those who help them.  Thos who are not Christian may find the book a bit preachy, but if they look past that, they will find practical applications that are helpful regardless of one’s faith tradition.  This book is an excellent resource for any lay person who helps wounded people, and a help to those who have been wounded.

The above review was contributed by: Penny Watkins, Free Lance Writer, Mother, Grandmother, and Cat Lady:  CLICK HERE  to read more of Penny's Reviews.