The Wounded Woman: Healing the Father-Daughter Relationship

I discovered this book after seeing it recommended in May Sarton's At Seventy. She admired Leonard's courage "in talking frankly about her relation to her father and combining her insights learned from patients (she is a psychotherapist) with her experience." Sarton said the book spoke to her with great force. The author uses fairy tales to make some of her points. Many women suffer from overweight, depression, harmful relationships, drug or alcohol dependency, or anxiety. The author traces much of this to the wounded relationship with the father. Actions that harm the father/daughter relationship include the father's inability to show love, alcoholism, drug addiction, abuse, divorce, abandonment or absence.

I tried everything to heal the riff between my father & myself. This book really lent a hand. We are all responsible for our healings but books like this are guideposts along the way. It definitely wetted my appetite for more. This book got me started. It was gentle enough just when I needed it most. There are others out there to sock you in the eye. But most people who have been abused cannot handle being punched another time. Gentle persuasion, & loving kindness are the key to really good healing.

What I loved about this book was that unlike so many other books on father-daughter relationships this one did not oversimplify. Too many other books try to blame the father or blame the daughter and to squeeze us all into clear, but inaccurate roles. Linda Schierse Leonard recognizes that we are not always the same, that we are all actors as well as acted upon, and helps make our choices and their consequences clear. Brava!

The reader from Houston would be advised to start thinking about the teachings of this book while she's doing her laundry. She might then find it deeper and more satisfying than her cursory reading of it implies. If it's true that the best books lead us onto other books, then this one passes the test with great generosity: I have already compiled an expanded reading (and film viewing) list from its pages. But it's more than that - a way for a woman to look at herself and the patterns of her life with a balance of emotion and detachment. It does not give easy and quick-fix solutions to what are, after all, heart-wrenching and ingrained problems, but a way towards transformation, towards breaking the negative patterns. On my first reading this book nearly broke me with its clear insights and wise compassion. How could a woman I don't know, half a world away, know so much about me? But it gave me the motivation to dig deeper and wider, and the eyes to see not only myself, my relationship with my father and with men, my creativity, but also my mother, my sisters, my friends. The use of myth - in fairy-tales, legends, novels and films - lends a strong intellectual framework to the book without sacrificing the emotional content, while the author's clinical experience and anecdotes from her own life places it firmly in the lives of real women. The author has done what many men say women cannot do: widen the perspective to embrace the large picture as well as zoom in on the details. I can't recommend this book enough, to men as well as women. Intelligent, perceptive, and emotionally mature.

Leonard writes of the wounds of fathers and how they wound daughters. I found this book illuminating for my own understanding of my self and my father. It helped me to develop compassion for my father and it helped me to move out of my own wounding. I recommend this book for any woman searching to understand the source of her angst