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Reading Mardou's comics about internal family systems has been life changing, so I owe her a debt. This is a beautifully composed work of art and a dramatic personal journey. She does a great job balancing powerful bits of info from trauma research and psychology with story telling. Overall I highly recommend.

Four stars because I felt something was missing. I actually think I got more from reading comics on her socials, that went into more short-story style deep dives on CPTSD flashbacks and crises, and how she used IFS to handle them. I wish there had been just a few more of these in the book. The story is there, but the moments where she was really lost seemed wrapped up in too pretty of a package. The comics she published online while writing this got lost in the confusion of emotional flashbacks, and that was more meaningful to me in terms of "how do we handle trauma as adults?" The book by itself feels like you could do Internal Family Systems therapy as a linear progression.

I highly recommend reading the book and also exploring her work she's published on instagram and elsewhere.

Well written. Also very upper middle class, very heteronormative, very neurotypical. It's like attachment styles are perfume choices and you can make a different choice.

Lots of studies but almost every one seemed like "these kinds of people are better and happier and look they will be better and happier in the future, so if you want to be happy you should act like them." The ableism was painful. The heteronormative erasure of queer love was painful. No serious reckoning with trauma or racism or desire or anything that actually shapes people's lives.

I would have enjoyed a light-hearted memoir about the author's friendship journey, which really seemed to be at the core of what she was trying to say. Even more if that memoir got more serious and started playing on the queer desire that repeatedly gets written off and supressed throughout each anecdote, personal and historical. A la "Carol," a la "The Hours."