by A. Y. Ford

Created on: September 23, 2009

Broken Children, Grown-Up Pain: Understanding the Effects of Your Wounded Past is a wonderful book about understanding and working through areas in your life that are negatively affected by hurts you experienced as a young person. Hegstrom is very open about his own personal experience with abuse as a child and how it affected him as an adult. He is not bashing those that hurt him but rather using his own life as an example of how when we do not deal with our hurts we just become another person causing hurts in others.

Hegstrom has dealt with the shame that would keep his own bad behaviors hidden. He admits he was abusive and unkind to his wife before he received healing from his wounded past. He admits he was unable to be a loving husband and father because he had too much pain in his own life to be of any comfort to others. He did not consciously think of hurting others. It is just how things work. If you are hurt and do not find healing you are much more susceptible to hurt others. His story does not end on a sad note. He gets the healing he needs and reunited with his wife and his grown children. He has found healing and wants to offer the same principles to others so they can find it as well.

He discusses how the hurts and abuse people endure as children can stunt their growth at whatever developmental stage they should be passing through. A person can become so wounded that in a certain area of development they truly do not mature.

He also discusses the wrong perceptions that adults see the world through because of the emotional injuries they have endured as children. These perceptions can keep a mature adult who may even function well in society from being effective in certain areas of their lives where they simply do not see things rationally as they are happening.

This book is unabashedly Christian; so many of the principles are based on Biblical principles. Having studied many different aspects of psychology, I still believe the concepts are professionally sound as well as Biblically so. I would suggest this book to anyone who experienced any type of abuse or neglect as a child. A childhood doesn't have to be horrible to have some elements of abuse. This book my help you find the key to unlock the pain and set free the person you were born to be.

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