MISSING FATHER:
A Daughter's Search for Love, Self-Acceptance, and a Parent Lost in the World of Mental Illness
At once a powerful story of a daughter's literal and figurative search for her father and an indictment of the mental health system with legacies to this day, Missing Father will touch readers searching to make sense of the complexities of love, family and self-understanding.
Missing Father spans the years from the 1940's through 2000, taking you in and out of mental hospitals, board and care and nursing homes, and the streets of New York and California. Filled with searing memories and beautiful, poetic writing, it captures the extraordinary character of a bipolar parent as seen through the eyes of a bewildered little girl who grows up to become a family therapist with children of her own.
While it is memoir, it reads like first-rate literature in a vein with classics such A Beautiful Mind and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Missing Father cuts through the layers of shame, alienation, and ups and downs of life in a family navigating through mental illness and will resonate with anyone who has tried to reach an inaccessible loved one.
Author Bio
Shauna L. Smith has been a licensed marriage, family and child therapist in private practice in Sacramento, Ca. for over thirty years. She is the author of Making Peace With Your Adult Children: A Guide to Family Healing (HarperCollins) and numerous articles, stories and poems.
Praise For Missing Father
"Missing Father...is beautifully rendered and filled with tenderness and compassion and clarity.... It reads like a dream."
-- Laura Davis, co-author of The Courage to Heal
"It is brilliant writer plus hard experience, heartbreak plus love, a beautiful, shared sculpture of human life."
--Gina Bliss, MD, pediatrician
"Missing Father is a deeply moving and insightful personal narrative that draws the reader into the unnerving world of mental health system realities.
--Lisa Bertaccini, LCSW, former chief of Child and Family Mental Health, Sacramento County
"Brilliant scenes abound throughout, as do moving, poetic images."
--Erica Miles, author of Dazzled by Darkness
"A heartbreaking journey from confused child to confident professional.... Missing Father will resonate with anyone who has tried to alleviate the suffering of an unreachable loved one."
-- Laurie Heller, adjunct faculty, Woodland Community College
"Smith's emotional honesty gives us permission to share our own dark secrets."
--Janet Greenwood, PhD, RN, LMFT
"Parents cast a shifting shadow over us and draw on our deepest wells of compassion. Smith in Missing Father uses memory, writing and reflection to put the shattered pieces of a loved one’s life into perspective."
-- Kathryn Gronke, MA
“Through compelling, emotionally revealing vignettes, Shauna Smith teaches us about the power of love and empathy. Lessons for all levels of mental health workers are found in the disturbing descriptions of how an uncaring system can contribute to wrecking a life. Also, our clients, those who are caretakers and those struggling with mental illness, may find validation and learn resilience.”
-- Jean Rosenfeld, LCSW
"I started Missing Father Monday night and couldn’t put it down! I love the short, bold “chapters.” And the mixing of narrative, conversation, and shared communication (letters), which, of course, would only be noteworthy with a well-written and compelling story."
-- Pauli Hakensen, addiction counselor, grief specialist
Praise for Making Peace With Your Adult Children: A Guide to Family Healing
“In the masses of literature available today, this is the book that speaks first and foremost to the healing of relationships between parents and adult children.“
—Claudia Black, Ph.D., author of It Will Never Happen to Me
“This book is a great contribution to the field. Shauna Smith provides a creative balance between the revelation of pain which needs to be overcome and the offering of sound guidance for healing.”
—Robert J. Ackerman, Ph.D., cofounder, National Association for Children of Alcoholics
"Making Peace With Your Adult Children will help parents and their adult children uncover and expand the common ground between them. Especially useful are the many innovative exercises."
—Modern Maturity
"Shauna Smith provides the wisdom for helping to attain meaningful parent-children relationships, from mid-life and beyond ... a book that really can change lives for the better."
—Leo Janos, former correspondent, Time magazine
"This book has the potential of healing the small and large injuries of the growing up process and of interrupting the relentless fashion in which violence and neglect are passed down through the generations."
—Claude Steiner, Ph.D, author of Scripts People Live
"After reading Making Peace With Your Adult Children I wrote letters to my kids. They got together and called me and we all met—it was unbelievable—we took a whole different path. This book has helped heal so many things from the past for us. The ultimate result is the closeness we feel.”
—parent of three children in Florida
"A much needed book written with experience and heart. I recommend it, especially for any parent who may feel upset or confused about their adult child's participation in a recovery program."
—Charles L. Whitfield, M.D., author of Healing the Child Within and Codependence: Healing the Human Condition
"Making Peace With Your Adult Children is literally an answer to a prayer.”
—parent of an adult child in Indiana
"This is a groundbreaking book. I highly recommend it for parents, adult children and therapists who are trying to stop the cycle of pain in the present and in future generations."
—Doris Herrscher, MFCC, President of the Sacramento Chapter of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists