THE THERAPY JOURNAL by Steven Wineman Is Now Available

 

Steven Wineman has decades of experience in community mental health, and a gift for sensitive, compassionate portrayals of difficult people. He’s an excellent writer, one with a truly canny ear for the rhythms of human voices. In The Therapy Journal, he has created exquisite characters capable of showing his readers how humans do respond to, survive, or are destroyed by abuse, whether physical or emotional.  

 

His protagonist, Becky Hoffman, therapist, has more or less successfully blocked her memories of sibling sexual abuse. However, the memories, personified as Child Becky, surface as she works with Lathsamy--a trafficked and now bi-polar patient--and as she confronts her own unplanned pregnancy and dysfunctional parents. As 38-year-old Becky learns and grows, so do readers learn--about why and how parents mishandle sibling abusers, for instance.  Though Steven Wineman depicts Child Becky as a separate person locked inside the adult therapist, the PTSD behaviors he describes, both for Becky and for her client Lathsamy, ring true.

 

You can find other samples of Wineman’s work on the internet: “Erving and Alice and Sky and Elisabeth” is beautifully done and especially relevant to Therapy Journal. It was the Cincinnati Review’s 2016 nominee for the Pushcart Prize for Nonfiction. Check out more of his essays online at Boston’s NPR station: http://www.wbur.org/inside/staff/steven-wineman. All royalties from Therapy Journal will go directly to three non-profits which work with victims of sexual abuse.

The Therapy Journal is available for sale in paperback and ebook formats at Amazon  here:

https://www.amazon.com/Therapy-Journal-Steven-Wineman/dp/193613537X 

and at Barnes & Noble  here: 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-therapy-journal-steven-wineman/1127029195?ean=9781936135370