"I've never read anything like this": A Review of Alisa Zipursky’s Book Healing Honestly
Review of Healing Honestly: The Messy and Magnificent Path to Overcoming Self-Blame and Self-Shame
By Victoria Wheeler, Member of the Diversability Leadership Collective
Disclosure: This review was written for the Diversability Leadership Collective after receiving a complimentary copy of Alisa Zipursky’s Healing Honestly: The Messy and Magnificent Path to Overcoming Self-Blame and Self-Shame.
UNTRUE STORY: I am not a professional literary critic and therefore wildly unqualified to write a review of this incredibly heavy, but also healing book.
BUT TRUTHFULLY: I am a human who has been through her fair share of trauma and who best processes information through writing, therefore I am perfectly qualified and capable of writing this book review.
There it is – a confession on my part right before we get into the “meat” of the book review. This is the format that Alisa Zipursky uses throughout the chapters of Healing Honestly: The Messy and Magnificent Path to Overcoming Self-Blame and Self-Shame. I feel an immense pressure to follow the format and the tone of book reviewers who have gone before me. This is a lie that my brain is telling me. The truth is that I am a different person with a different lived experience and can only review the book to the best of my ability, regardless of whether I follow in the footsteps of others or not.
Zipursky sits down with us as readers to tell her story as a survivor of childhood sexual assault (henceforth abbreviated as CSA), hoping that it will resonate with fellow survivors and give some insight to those who know and love survivors of CSA, but aren’t sure how to take steps in empathizing with them. She takes great care not to re-traumatize fellow CSA survivors with graphic details of her own abuse, and I have to say that she does a fantastic job of it.
The untrue story/true story dichotomy is a format followed throughout all ten chapters of this book. The ten truths that Zipursky enumerates as a part of the process of “healing honestly” as a CSA survivor are as follows:
You are a real survivor
Our brains are protecting us
No one should dismiss our health needs
We are delightful friends
Our bodies are wise about sexual healing
It’s unbelievable how loveable we are
Our healing journey invites our families to heal
We are great at spotting abusive workplaces
We are the experts in our safety
We always deserve healing
The author gives strategies backed by scientific research, her lived experience, and the lived experience of others (particularly those who are part of marginalized groups of people) in order to help us move away from the lies that the brain tells a CSA survivor and towards truth and healing.
The writing style is part confessional, part advice column. It’s having a friend who has done incredible amounts of healing work in therapy knowing that the friend she’s talking with isn’t necessarily able to afford therapy, so she takes everything she’s learned and wraps it up in a nice little book that makes a big impact, ready to share.
This book puts a big focus on the balance between sitting with your trauma triggers and the resulting feelings and moving through those triggers towards truth and healing. There’s less of a focus on remembering exactly what happened to a CSA survivor as a child, and more of a focus on what’s happening in the present and how the survivor can “rewrite their story”, so to speak, and heal from their past.
There’s an urge for me to compare it to other books I’ve read before, but the truth is that I’ve never read anything like this. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s so beautifully unique that nothing like it has ever been written before, or if I just haven’t taken a deep enough dive into the self-help genre. Either way, it’s a dense read that might feel like you’ve gone through a month of therapy sessions after a single chapter. I say this not to discourage you from reading the book, but rather to prepare you for what the reading experience might be like, both physically and emotionally, especially if you are reading it as a CSA survivor yourself.
Pick up the book. Start the book. Take all the time that you need to read the book, even if it means taking a rest break at the end of each chapter, like the author herself encourages us to do. She encourages us to rest as we read and process, knowing that healing is truly a never-ending journey full of difficult, exhausting work. Healing is not linear, as they say. Healing honestly will look different for everyone, and this book is a wonderful example of that truth.
I would go so far as to say re-read the book every once in a while, and see what new insight could be gained with each read. I plan to re-read the book after time has passed, to gage how far I’ve progressed in my own trauma healing work. My sincerest gratitude to the author for daring to help others heal through her own vulnerability.
You can pre-order the book at https://amzn.to/43wQ6Ke
About the author:
Victoria Wheeler graduated with a B.A. in Spanish from the University of Tennessee Knoxville in 2013. Though her original career goal was to help people in a medical setting by being a Spanish medical interpreter and document translator, in more recent years, she has found power in embracing her identity as a disabled person and working to advocate for herself and other disabled people. She still has the chance to help people like she wanted to as an interpreter, but the Diversability Leadership Collective has encouraged her to learn how to help herself, too.