Damaged Bonds

'It is one of life's chilling characteristics that bonds that nourish also damage. We are formed and malformed at the same time. In an earlier work, Toxic Nourishment (1999), I explored the ways that emotional nourishment and toxins are fused. Damaged Bonds complements and adds to this, by encouraging us to look at and face, as we can, how we wound and are wounded by the bonds we need to live. It is, perhaps, part of life's oddity that doing so, to the extent we are able, brings its own kind of joy. '...It is the underlying assumption of this book that the therapy bond (both damaged/damaging and generative) helps support dream-work and connections between dream reality and every-day waking activities. It is thus, also, our hope that therapy helps improve psychic digestion. At a minimum, we suspect that it will help us to learn something about our relationship to emotional processes, so that we can become better partners to ourselves and others.'- Michael Eigen, from the Preface