Now a Kindle eBook: “Don’t Try This Alone!”

I’m done!  I’ve just finished a seven-year trek to publish my book, first in paperback, and now as a Kindle eBook.  Here’s my Kindle: “Don’t Try This Alone: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder” – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BN2J4TN

My Kindle link above also has a free sample which Amazon has selected to show the public.

Now the saga of discovering how sick with attachment disorder I was, digging deeper and deeper into it — then climbing back to be healed from the inside out — is over.  What a relief!

Of course, we all keep healing all our lives, plus now I’ve got a marketing maze ahead of me — but I’m going to take the time to slow down and feel the relief.

I really did have to face cellular-level pain “from when the sperm hit the egg,” and it hurt. A lot. That’s why this took so long.  It’s been like giving birth after an seriously long and grueling gestation.

I performed with apparent success as an international business gal and opera singer for decades, with no idea I was ill. Suddenly in 2006, I was in divorce from a 27-year marriage to my college sweetheart which left me bankrupt. I ran like hell, 3,000 miles from back East to California. Then both my parents died and I had two bad rebound affairs – five life disasters in 18 months.

It felt like being hit by two cars, two trucks, and a jet airplane. I came to where my father died in 2008, and I couldn’t cry.

“You need to have your head examined,”  I decided. I saw one therapist who listened helplessly, a second who said “grow up,” and then I read enough studies on the incompetence of psychotherapy to quit.

Do It Yourself? Dangerous!

So I opted for do-it-yourself. That was a mistake that almost cost my life.

I wrote Grief Forgiveness letters to my ex and sobbed over my life-long marriage for 18 months. Yet after a week’s relief, intense “break-through” grief about my dad surfaced. I tried to face the dad pain–but the more grief I addressed, the more and deeper layers of emotional pain surfaced.

The feelings coming up were those of a younger and younger me. As I wrote forgiveness letters to my dad, I felt feelings from grade school; the voice of a five-year-old girl literally popped up speaking in my head.

Then as I wrote letters to my mom, I went back, and back, and back – but where was the bottom, with a mom?

There were so many deep layers, it felt like falling through miles of rock layers as deep as the endless striated walls of the Grand Canyon. I began to feel emotional, physical, chest and gut pain like a 24 x 7 bone marrow transplant without anesthesia which went on for about three years.

My Big Fat Accidental Discovery

It was all an accident. I didn’t mean to do it, a point I never tired of making later to astonished doctors and in prayer (God took it in stride).

But once I was falling through the layers of the Grand Canyon, there was no way to stop – short of alcohol or the like, which disgusted me – or suicide.

Jumping off my balcony often did seem quite attractive. Imagine my annoyance when I had to give up even that, after seeing suicide’s nasty effects on a friend whose spouse took that route.

I literally had No Exit and it stank – so down and down I went, down through the layers of flash-backs and pain until one 2011 morning at 2 am I found myself on the bedroom floor in a fetal position, clutching a large stuffed dog, and eyeing a soggy toothbrush with which I had not even been able to brush my teeth before crumpling.

The phrase “She’s not old enough to be dropped off at school” kept repeating in my skull. I crawled to the sink, but had to hang on to the stuffed animal to stand up and brush.

Somewhere in a textbook I had read about regression, the devolution of the mind back through childhood development stages.

With my extensive notes of the last few years, I staggered into yet a third therapist’s office a week later, presented the goods, and asked, “Do you think I’ve just accidentally regressed myself back to infancy?” Upon examination, he leaned forward, eyes wide, and nodded solemnly, “Yes. Aren’t you scared?”

You said it, brother, but not nearly as scared as I was gonna be. Since the sperm hit the egg, I’d had traumatic attachment disorder, and bad.

“Yet there’s hope!” as Amazon concludes.  “Kathy’s story also shows: help and healing are out there!”

Read the book and you’ll see what it took–but it can be done.

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News blogs expand on my book Don’t Try This Alone: The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder.  Watch as my journey of recovery teaches me the hard way about Adult Attachment Disorder, Developmental Trauma, Attachment Theory, and the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI).

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