Annals Sept/Oct 2002

Setting YourSelf Free: Breaking the Cycle of Emotional Abuse in Family, Friendships, Work and Love

By SaraKay Smullens, M.S.W., LCSW, BCD, DAPA

Emotional abuse, like a bad gene, passes from generation to generation in a vicious cycle. It creates sad, angry and fragile children who grow up to perpetuate the cycle as bitter and frustrated adults. But the cycle doesn't stay within the confines of the family; it infects the emotionally abused adults' relationships with every person they know, whether a friend, relative, child, co-worker, boss or lover. The only way to stop poisoning close ties and keep toxic behavior from spreading is to break the cycle.

In her new book, SaraKay Smullens empowers men and women to identify the signs of emotional abuse cycles and understand the five major types (rage, enmeshment, extreme overprotection, rejection/abandonment and complete neglect) and offers advice to destroy the chain. This book enables readers to confront painful emotional injuries and offers direct yet comforting step-by-step programs to help put an end to the cycles of emotional abuse that pervade every aspect of victims' lives. All exercises, life examples, journal entries and InnerSelf dialogues encouraged in Setting YourSelf Free may be used with professional counseling and psychotherapy to augment the vital process of achieving deeper insights and necessary attitudinal and behavioral changes.

SaraKay's personal history forms the backdrop for Setting YourSelf Free.When her first marriage ended in l975, her two daughters were ages four and seven. It became necessary to fight for a divorce in a state that at that time did not provide 'no fault' divorce, equitable division of marital property, or alimony. With no family support or financial resources, the author began a journal for the first time in her life. Her goal was to understand what internal force kept those under enormous pressure from, in her words, "falling through the cracks of life." SaraKay concluded that it was the state of dignity that kept one from emotional disintegration when faced with life's injustices, inequities, betrayals and cruelties.

In 1982, SaraKay Smullens returned to her journal to determine those factors that threatened the development of this sense of dignity ­ and how to effectively overcome them. The result of her 20-year effort is Setting YourSelf Free, which offers a codification of five cycles of emotional abuse that, without intervention, perpetuate malignantly from generation to generation ­ destroying the potential and opportunities of individuals, marriages, families, friendships and communities ­ with dangerous societal implications.

The author has had many years of clinical experience, beginning as a young social worker in 1965. The founder of the Philadelphia area's Sabbath of Domestic Peace coaltion, she has worked with individuals, couples and families from a diversity of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds and writes also from her own life experience. During her years as a single parent and in the early years of her second marriage, she was a writer and columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Since that time, SaraKay has continued both to appear on local and national television programs and to write op-ed columns and articles for various newspapers, applying psychological insights to social and political issues, often cushioning stark realities with humor.

SaraKay Smullens describes herself as, ..."on a mission to encourage people to learn to think about, frame, understand, address, confront and solve problems and challenges psychologically" To learn more, visit SaraKay¹s website at www.sarakaysmullens.com.

For more information about Setting YourSelf Free, contact your local book store or the publisher, New Horizon Press, P.O. Box 669, Far Hills, N.J. 07931; toll free (800) 533-7978; ISBN 0-88282-224-1; $14.95.