Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path of healing and have a new experience of yourself.

Today, with all the stressors of life closing in, overreacting to the smallest things is a signal that perhaps some of what you are experiencing is from your past. If you feel "hysterical," it might be historical.

So, it is time to learn more about the core areas we struggle with and how they damaged our childhood. What do they look like when they show up today, and how can you start understanding and working with them so you can start creating a daily practice to heal those wounds. Whether it is from abuse or neglect, they have all left their mark on you, and it is time to change.

This book breaks down the core areas of damage, teaches in-depth what is functional, and explains how to heal it today. It also delves into how to create a more functional or wiser self that can re-parent those wounded parts.

Informed by the Core Issues work of Pia Mellody, author of Facing Codependence, you will learn and adopt the following five core practices for healthy living:

• Healthy Self-Esteem and how to live in it
• Healthy Boundaries to protect and connect in relationships
• Understanding your sense of self and your reality
• Learn to create excellent self-care
• To be moderate rather than live in extremes

• Cultivate a framework for your functional self
• Gain clarity about your family of origin history
• Re-parent your historical inner children and wounded parts of self
• Learn to speak your truth and how to have your own back
• To gather and use resources to help you heal from childhood trauma

Gifts from a Challenging Childhood: Creating a Practice for Becoming Your Healthiest Self is a must-read. It provides specific examples and downloadable healing exercises. This life-changing book is easy to read, has easy-to-understand charts, and has easy-to-follow teaching.

"In Gifts from a Challenging Childhood, " author Jan Bergstrom describes with empathy and clarity the exact emotional, intellectual, and neurological ways that children's brains respond to trauma and how the impact of that experience endures in the child's life throughout adulthood. Bergstrom explains how our basic needs as children for love, protection, validation, and expression must be met by our parents and how, when these needs are not met in childhood, we can end up with one-up or one-down self-esteem and over-protective or under-protective boundaries as adults. In-depth descriptions of supportive, therapeutic techniques abound in this book, from mindfulness to grounding to writing a letter to yourself. Whether you experienced traumatic neglect or excessive control and enmeshment at the hands of your parents, this book will not only help you identify what went wrong for you, it will also provide you with validating, supportive and compassionate ways to reparent yourself."

Jonice Webb, PhD.
Author of Running on Empty