“But what about me?”
“Is it possible to go one day without dealing with the survivor’s issues?”
“Will we ever make love again?”
“Will the survivor love me in the end?”
“How do I know if I should throw in the towel?”

Based on in-depth interviews and her workshops for partners across the country, Laura Davis offers practical advice and encouragement to all partners–girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses, and lovers–trying to support the survivors in their lives while tending to their own needs along the way. She shows couples how to deepen compassion, improve communication, and develop an understanding of healing as a shared activity. Addressing partners’ most important questions, Allies in Healing covers:

• The Basics–answers common questions about sexual abuse.
• Allies in Healing–introduces key concepts of working and growing together.
• My Needs and Feelings–teaches partners to recognize, value, and express their own needs.
• Dealing with Crisis–includes strategies for handling suicidal feelings, regression, and hopelessness.
• Intimacy and Communication–offers practical advice on dealing with distancing, control, trust, and fighting.
• Sex–provides guidelines for coping with flashbacks, lack of desire, differences in sexual needs, and frustration.
• Family lssues–suggests a range of ideas for interacting with the survivor’s family.
• Partners’ Stories–explores the struggles, triumphs, and courage of eight partners.

This riveting memoir by Laura Davis, author of The Courage to Heal, examines the endurance of mother–daughter love, how memory protects and betrays us, and the determination it takes to fulfill a promise when ghosts from the past come knocking.
When she published The Courage to Heal in 1988, Laura Davis helped more than a million women work through the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. But her decision to go public with her grandfather’s incest deepened an already painful estrangement with her mother, Temme.
Over the next twenty years, from a safe distance of 3,000 miles, Laura and Temme reconciled their volatile relationship and believed that their difficult past was behind them. But when Temme moves across the country to entrust her daughter with the rest of her life, she brings a faltering mind, a fierce need for independence, and the seeds of a second war between them. As the stresses of caregiving rekindle Laura’s rage over past betrayals, they threaten her intention to finally love her mother “without reservation.” Will she learn what it means to be truly open-hearted before it’s too late?