New Book Available–For YOU!

Family Mobbing Book

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/717592/daughters-healing-from-family-mobbing-by-stephanie-sellers-phd/9781623178437

A galvanizing call to end family-based anti-female violence, shaming, and shunning–stories and practices for healing from Family Mobbing.

“Family Mobbing” is a strategic process of power and control. When daughters are mobbed, they’re not just shunned, attacked, or slandered: they’re also subjugated by a system of family rules that reinforces patriarchal oppression. What makes mobbing so insidious–and so under-reported–is that here, family itself is the site of violence, trauma, and shame.

Family violence against girls and women is still legal–even in America, and even now. Across cultures, girls and women may be shunned or shamed, emotionally mistreated, or physically attacked by their families to maintain status, social conventions, and the family’s own standing within their community. Family Mobbing tactics can include slander, gossip, rejection, beatings, anti-Queer violence, and even honor killings, child marriages, and forced abortion.

Author Stephanie Sellers–herself a survivor–explores the global phenomenon of Family Mobbing, revealing the secrets and patterns that play out behind closed doors and remain unseen, unacknowledged, and unaddressed. She discusses:

  • Why families and communities alienate members of their groups
  • Why women, girls, and LGBTQIA2S+ people are at higher risk of mobbing
  • The ramifications of raising daughters to be submissive
  • How (and why) mothers and grandmothers perpetuate cycles of Family Mobbing against their daughters
  • How to move on after being mobbed, shunned, or shamed
  • Firsthand accounts from people all over the world who were mobbed by their families
  • How different religious worldviews inform the practice and perpetuation of Family Mobbing

Sellers offers stories, definitions, and solutions to help women, girls, and people of all genders who have been mobbed by their families. She remembers and honors vast, ancient traditions that recognize female sanctity and personhood as paths forward to healing, with a focus on the practices and worldviews of Mother-first cultures that can illuminate the path toward honoring, valuing, and respecting daughters.

Betrayal

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Betrayal

“She did the worst thing to me that anyone can do to anyone else–Let them believe that they’re loved and wanted, and then show them that it’s all a sham.”
― Agatha Christie, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side

Understanding the power of betrayal is part of the healing process for women who have been rejected, estranged, and shunned by their biological families. Naming their behavior for what it is, betrayal, allows us to more clearly focus our healing treatment. We have to recognize and understand our wounding before we can recognize and understand the medicine.

“We say, ‘It wasn’t that bad. It was all my fault. I’m making all this stuff up.’
All my life, I spoke bitterly of my mother’s treatment of me as a child.
Friends asked, “What did she do to you?“ I couldn’t really describe it, and in frustration would say, “Well, she didn’t lock us up in closets.” In fact, my mother behaved much worse than that, but by focusing on the empty closet, I avoided looking at what waited beyond it.”  ― Sarah E. Olson, Becoming One: A Story of Triumph Over Dissociative Identity Disorder

Healing betrayal is about recovering our inner self that trusted people who are supposed to be, by historic, religious, and cultural concepts of family, those who are fundamentally infused with the charge of trustworthiness above all others.  When they willfully and unapologetically fail us, it can be incomprehensible. Regaining our sense of stability and our trusting, not just of others but of life itself, is the needed antidote to the biological family’s poison.

“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection. Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.”― Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Welcome Daughters!

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Welcome! Sedna’s Daughters is a virtual home for women who have been estranged from or shunned by our biological families. This blog provides a forum for daughters to share our stories and engage in an international conversation about family estrangement and shunning, regardless of the reason.

Find us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/sednas.daughters.

A source for additional resources, support, and tools for healing can be found at the Sedna’s Daughters Community website:  http://sednasdaughters.com.