Perhaps the most important relationship book of the decade, The Miserable Marriage Handbook for Women, How to Survive and Grow While Trapped in a Miserable Marriage, addresses one of the biggest secrets in our culture-the appalling way that women are treated by their husbands or partners in the privacy of their homes. If you are in a miserable marriage, getting out of one, or haunted by memories of a destructive relationship, this book is for you.
'You Are Not Alone' are the words author Kathleen Keith uses to begin this book in which she shares the Survive and Grow Steps she developed to rescue herself from a miserable marriage and save her sanity and her life. The author pulls back the curtain on the fundamental issue for every woman trapped in a miserable marriage-we know that the 'really nice guy' we are married to, isn't. We know it's a lie. No one believes us if we tell the truth about our life with him. And no one is sympathetic to the word 'trapped' because only those of us who have experienced the misery of life with a narcissist, passive aggressive, addict (anger, substance, porn, gambling, online gaming) and abuse, know how trapped we are.
This book answers the question, is it miserable or abusive? It explores the confusion with which women in a miserable marriage live, and it validates their experience. It examines issues of conscience, manipulation, financial abuse, emotional distancing, forgiveness, and what the author terms 'the bar stool psychology of divorce.'
Most important, the Survive and Grow Steps are practical and the author provides a Transformation Action Plan to help women who are trapped in a miserable marriage find self-respect, self-value and reclaim their life.
In this book you will learn to face and accept the truth about your marriage, your husband and yourself. You will learn to reclaim your value as a woman and to appreciate the wonder of your uniqueness. You will learn new response behaviors. You will become empowered in your womanhood.
This gentle, yet challenging book, reaches out to women who are hurting and searching for answers, understanding, compassion and practical help. The author has walked in your shoes and personally knows a life consumed by sadness, despair, anger, fear, exhaustion and confusion. A miserable marriage steals your enthusiasm for life, robs your energy, vitality, self-worth and self-image, and causes you to question your sanity. The pain of having your spiritual lifeblood, the essence of who you are, drained from you by someone you love, and who vowed to love you, defies description. Life is consumed by tension, fear, and devoting yourself to placating an impossible-to-please man.
To survive and grow becomes a journey of healing and transformation that engages our intellect, our emotions, and the spiritual essence of what it means to be a woman. This is not a book about him and why he is the way he is. This book is about us and how we can cope with him and survive and grow while we are trapped. No one understands what it is like to be trapped in a miserable marriage unless they have lived it themselves. You cannot learn about it from interviewing others, you have to live it. Women who are trapped in a miserable marriage are a secret sisterhood because they do not talk about the truth of life inside their homes. The author reveals the secrets and readers will learn how to cope with the man who can never be satisfied, the man who refuses to address any problems, the man who manipulates incessantly to get his way, and much more.
The Survive and Grow Steps are not a quick fix. They require determination and commitment. But determination and commitment are what keep women going in miserable marriages. The Miserable Marriage Handbook for Women provides support and encouragement to every woman trapped in a miserable marriage.
