Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adult's Life--for the Better

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Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adult's Life--for the Better (eBook) Pub. Date: 1/5/2010 Publisher: Basic Books
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Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adult's Life--for the Better (First Trade Paper Edition) Pub. Date: 1/5/2010 Publisher: Basic Books
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Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adult's Life--for the Better Pub. Date: 4/28/2008 Publisher: Basic Books

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Overview

Although five percent of the population loses a mother or father...few of us are psychologically prepared for the experience in later life. Death Benefits explores the uncharted territory each of us enters when a parent leaves us, and offers a blueprint for positive change in every aspect of our lives. Death Benefits demonstrates through powerful stories (including the author’s own revelatory experience) how parent loss is the most potent catalyst for change in middle age and can actually offer us our last, best chance to become our truest, deepest selves. Safer challenges the conventional wisdom that fundamental change is only for the young; and that loss must simply be endured or overcome. Filled with moving and engaging stories of real men and women re-imagining themselves after a parent’s death, it is a fresh, impassioned, and sophisticated look at self-transformation in later life.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Psychotherapist Safer appears to be targeting surviving adult children of dysfunctional parents when she claims, "The death of your parents can be the best thing that ever happens to you." Safer (The Normal One: Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling) describes her own mother as an unhappy woman who viewed her daughter as an extension of herself; she also relates anecdotes from patients and 60 interviewees whose parents were critical or rejecting, or who significantly impeded their children's happiness and personal growth. In other cases, parents dominated their children's lives because of prolonged illness. Safer offers some perspective along with helpful exercises for adult children to begin to heal from emotional wounds inflicted by their parents. For instance, just as one sorts through a parent's physical possessions and keeps some while discarding others, one can do the same with parents' emotional legacy. Some will be shocked by the central idea of Safer's book; others seeking to free themselves from ties that have bound too tightly will welcome Safer's message: there's no need to feel guilty about a sense of freedom and finding one's true self after a parent's death. (May)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780465018574
Publisher: Basic Books
Publication date: 1/5/2010
Edition description: First Trade Paper Edition
Pages: 240
Sales rank: 488,463
Product dimensions: 5.00 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 0.70 (d)

Meet the Author

Jeanne Safer, Ph.D. has been a psychotherapist for thirty-five years and is the author of three previous books on neglected psychological topics. Dr. Safer appears frequently on television and radio, and lectures on insight and transformation in adulthood for general and professional audiences. She has written for O: The Oprah Magazine, More magazine, the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Dr. Safer lives in New York City.

Author's Note ix

Introduction: Life After Death 1

Part I Death Changes Everything

Chapter 1 My Death Benefit (Autobiography) 11

Chapter 2 Death Benefits: The Last Taboo 49

Chapter 3 Going Through the Stuff: Choosing a Legacy 63

Part II Life Benefits: Body, Mind, and Spirit

Chapter 4 Using the Good China: Deserving a Life at Last 81

Chapter 5 My Body, Myself: Health and Beauty Benefits 91

Chapter 6 Till Death Do Us Part: Marriage and Divorce 103

Chapter 7 Lifted Up in My Mother's Arms: Religious Epiphanies 119

Chapter 8 A Voice of My Own: Creative Self-Expression 131

Part III Orphans' Benefits: Seeing Parents with New Eyes

Chapter 9 Father Knows Best? The Punitive Parent Dies 145

Chapter 10 Mom's Best Friend: The End of Emotional Caretaking 157

Part IV In Morte Veritas: The Insights Death Brings

Chapter 11 The Eleventh Hour: Near-Death Revelations 171

Chapter 12 Perspectives from the Deathspace 183

Chapter 13 In Their End Is My Beginning: Cultivating Death Benefits 205

Acknowledgments 217

Notes 219

Index 221

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