Jan Bergstrom, LMHC

I am well-acquainted with childhood trauma. When I was four and a half years old after the birth of my younger brother, I found my mother overdosed on her bedroom floor. She spent six months in a psychiatric hospital. During my mother's absence, as my father drove my brother and me to the store, he collided head-on with another vehicle, and the other driver died. My father was critically wounded. I became parentless for several months after, which felt like years. This trauma set the stage for a lifelong interest in the impact of childhood trauma and my passion for healing today.

Based on a framework created by trauma recovery expert Pia Mellody, best-selling author of Facing Co-dependence, I wrote “Gifts from a Challenging Childhood: Creating a Practice for Becoming Your Healthiest Self” to guide you as you travel your healing journey. My hope for you is that it will change your life, as it has changed mine. As you discover how your Family of Origin affects your functioning today, you will learn an empowering healing methodology to become your healthiest Self by:

• Learning and practicing the 5 Core Practices for Healthy Living
• Cultivating a healthy Functional Adult Self
• Getting clear on your family of origin history
• Re-parenting those historically hurt places
• Having your back by speaking your truth
• Using guides along your healing journey

Endorsements:

I’ve been a therapist for 10 years and have been subtly searching for a method of practice to feel fully integrated in. Self-therapist-client. All within the context of something we all go through. Our childhood experiences and journey into and through adulthood. This book is the embodiment of that practice. My experience has taught me that the way to healing is through connection. Self to self. Therapist to client.

Jan’s excellent work touches on what I consider fundamental human healing as we understand our stories from our childhood. Not only is this book good for clients but also therapists. We are all in this together.

Jan’s style of writing is down-to-earth, engaging, and practical. I finished the book understanding myself, my clients, and my work better. This will be a book I give many of my clients as I work with them in Pia Melody’s foundational therapy model. I cannot recommend this book enough! ~ John H.

Using her own experience as a survivor of childhood trauma, and stories of many clients to illustrate, Jan's insight has helped me recognize examples of neglect in my fairly happy childhood in a family of nine children.
 
It's painful to recognize my parents' shortcomings, and at the same time, it's freeing to better understand what happened to me and my response to being neglected and lost in the crowd at key points in my development. I am more able to forgive myself for some bad choices I made in response to the neglect.
 
There's no perfect childhood or parents. This book identifies the type and degree of trauma you may have experienced, and it might not be what you expected.
 
Jan outlines five specific practices to live more in the present and shed the impact of parental mistakes. One of the most valuable practices for me is to establish healthier boundaries, for myself and in my relationship to others. I love the practice of asking for what I need and want, instead of being needless and wantless, like the "lost child."
 
I really appreciate her wisdom, and the courage to share her own experience at age 5, when she found her mother passed out on the floor from an overdose. Thank you, Jan, for a better understanding of myself and others and new practices for a better life. I've already bought a gift copy. ~ Susan TW

Ms. Bergstrom has whittled down her extensive experience with the top experts in the field to the essentials needed to radically transform your life and deal with the internal challenges we all face as we attempt to mold a life we want to have instead of the one that is in a way, predestined.
 
As a recovering alcoholic in the 12-step tradition, I find Ms. Bergstrom’s direction and encouragement contained in these pages to be galvanizing in this groundbreaking look at how to reparent oneself and give oneself a chance to thrive. ~ David S