Soul Damage, Soul Remedy
How to Heal the Soul from Emotional Abuse and Energy Fragmentation
About pursuing personal wellness and healing from emotional trauma, Soul Damage, Soul Remedy is an encouraging self-help book.
Mariane E. Weigley’s spiritual self-help book Soul Damage, Soul Remedy is about “unraveling” past pains through the concerted process of self-discovery and personal renewal.
Weigley knows from personal experience that people enduring emotional abuse can appear, on the outside, to be leading successful, fulfilling lives. Indeed, her book relates how she was a lawyer, wife, and a mother of two who felt fragmented by continual abuse by her mother. Her existence, she writes, was tentative despite appearances; she was always in “Survival Mode.” In time, though, she pursued personal wellness; here, she shows how others might do the same.
The book’s personal stories of family dysfunction, in particular in relation to Weigley’s relationships with her mother and brother, are brief. Universal suggestions are prioritized over personal stories, with the latter appearing as examples of facilitating internal changes rather than as the book’s core. Spirituality also informs, but doesn’t overwhelm, this text, in which space is made for seekers who don’t believe in concepts like intuition and soul detachment: “You might not be ready to receive these ideas now, but you might be in the future.” Further, the overall tone is matter-of-fact and direct, enabling greater understanding of intangible events. When covering how disconnected energy forms moved toward Weigley to reintegrate into her energy field, for instance, its descriptions are dispassionate: Some crawled at a slow pace, and others moved faster, the book asserts. Other uncanny events are also recalled, as with frozen legs that refused to move and the sense that Weigley entered a “crystal coffin made of paralyzing energy.” Such experiences are presented as understandable responses to repeated trauma.
However, some of the book’s self-care suggestions are overfamiliar, limiting their persuasiveness. Indeed, the book encourages people to drink water, listen to music, smell different scents, practice movement, and sit in the sunlight when seeking to heal from emotional abuse. The book also suggests creating timelines of important events to bring order and even engaging in wordplay.
Though its tips are of varying persuasiveness, the text does a credible job of promoting small joys as means of being able to experience life at full force once more. Indeed, Weigley shares poignant personal examples of shifting from living at 15 percent to living again, including how she started wearing fingernail polish in bright colors and eating chocolate again after decades of thinking she had a chocolate allergy. Other suggestions are more amorphous, as with the book’s prompts toward atypical journaling methods: writing a question with one hand and answering with the other; turning pages upside down; drawing pictures.
Soul Damage, Soul Remedy is an encouraging self-help book that points the way toward achieving meaningful change at an incremental rate.
Reviewed by
Andrea Kreidler
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
