Every Family Has A Story: How we inherit love and loss

Broadcast: 13 Oct, 2022 Duration: 1h26

What predicts family breakdown? Why do our families drive us mad? What is it the enables some families to thrive despite enormous adversity, when others fragment?

Join Author and psychotherapist, Julia Samuels as she discusses her latest publication with psychoanalyst and Author, Stephen Grosz.

Our family relationships fundamentally influence our health and happiness — but we think too narrowly about the impact of our families on our lives.

In Every Family Has A Story, bestselling psychotherapist Julia Samuel turns from her acclaimed work with individuals to draw on her sessions with a wide variety of families. Through eight beautifully told and insightful case studies, she analyses a range of common issues, from separation and step-relationships to leaving home and loss, and shows how much is passed from one generation to the next — and how this inheritance can be faced together. Uncovering how deeply we are influenced by our families – including the often under-appreciated impact of grandparents and siblings – and incorporating the latest academic research, she offers insights that are applicable to us all. Her 12 touchstones for family wellbeing – from fighting productively to making time for rituals – provide us with the tools to be better family members ourselves, and to create the families we wish for.

This is a moving and reassuring meditation that, amidst trauma and hardship, tells unforgettable stories of forgiveness, learning and love.

‘This book isn’t about how to raise perfect families. They don’t exist. Families are in constant flux, which is why they are so complicated and why they are such hard work. At times, families need to pull together, and at others to step back. It is this dance – the moving in and out as a family, seeking harmony while allowing differences – that supports stability. At its best, family is the safe place where we can be our whole selves, with all of our frailties and fault-lines, and still be loved and deeply understood.’

Julia Samuel, MBE, is a leading British psychotherapist and the author of the Sunday Times bestsellers This Too Shall Pass and Grief Works. During the last thirty years, she has worked first for the NHS and then in private practice, and she is Founder Patron of Child Bereavement UK and the Vice President of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. She features regularly in the national media and has presented the podcasts A Living Loss and Grief Works.

Stephen Grosz is a practicing psychoanalyst—he has worked with patients for more than twenty-five years. Born in America, educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford University, he teaches at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London. He lives in London. His stories have appeared in the Financial Times Weekend Magazine and Granta. A Sunday Times bestseller, The Examined Life is his first book.

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