If Marie Did It, So Can I

The Farm is proud to announce the publication of Dr. Donna LaMar’s book: Marie Did it, So Can I! Surviving, healing and transcending abuse and neglect in the fall of 2009!

Marie Did It, So Can I is based on over thirty years of research! It describes how individuals rise above the disparity of the unthinkable beginnings of abuse and neglect. Learn how others have overcome, healed and grown beyond the painful darkness of dysfunctional families to the light of hope and a new kind of life. This book is for those individuals who have grown up in this kind of family and want to learn you are not alone as well as how others have successfully transcended the rugged realities of a difficult family situation. Professionals reading this book can learn the techniques used by successful transcenders and put them into practice with their own clients.

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In her comprehensive and highly readable book, the author leads us from the dark beginnings of individuals with painful childhood experiences, through their self-realizations, and onto their courageous journeys to healthy adulthoods. This is a book of horrendous beginnings and astonishing happy endings. The book is illustrated with vivid, often painful, and finally rewarding accounts from a multitude of transcenders who were interviewed for over Dr. LaMar’s thirty years of research. Her book tackles an enormously difficult – and elevating- subject: the victims of abuse who exceed their difficult origins to forge stable lives. Transcenders are individuals who in spite of the horrific traumas they suffer growing up work hard to survive, heal and create healthier lives. It is framed in a cogent and thoughtful academic exposition she explores the ways in which these exceptional people have nurtured and protected themselves from destructive forces of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, poverty, and neglect to rise above and beyond the prediction of statistics.

This book offers hope and healing to survivors of abuse and neglect. Statistics indicate that as high as 50% of the world’s population has been abused/neglected! The information in the book has and will change victims to transcenders. Sadly, if victims do not heal the painful, dysfunctional patterns of survival behavior learned in childhood, the victim and those around them will suffer until they do. Donna F. LaMar, PhD has studied and researched victims who did not succumb, but rose above it and became transcenders. This book is about their journey of pain and healing teaching us how they did it.