A Midlife Voyage To Transformation By Donna Roe Daniell Book Tour, Guest Post & Giveaway! {Ends 8/12/22}

Review By LAWonder10:

‘A Midlife Voyage to Transformation’ is a book addressing unforeseen issues in one woman’s life, causing her to go through in depth research in many fields for self-preservation , plus, aiding clients she worked with as a therapist. After getting her Master’s degree and her husband getting his PhD, Donna’s husband agreed to try for a child which quickly came about. Little did she know what would follow after childbirth. 

Donna discusses some of the emotional, physical and mental challenges women are often placed in a position to endure. It strengthens popular belief that women are incredible. Although some “fold into themselves” and try to run away from it, most women search and discover ways to meet the challenges they are called upon ti bear. i.e. parenting issues, career, maintaining relationships, divorce, care of older siblings or parents/grandparents, surprise  etc. During these times menopause hits! This sometimes increase health issues in addition to the emotional and physical “merry-go-round” problems associated with this process.

The author shares, not only her experiences, but gives the reader the valuable benefit of her research and insight concerning these various situations. She emphasizes the importance of creating the physical, mental, emotional balance and introduces ways and programs to aid in doing so.

In the past several decades so much research has not only been done on the physical, but on the overall functions of the marvelous controlling organ – the brain.

Many therapeutic programs have come about and Donna discusses several within these pages. She also emphasizes the importance of self-discovery and overcoming ones own “mental hang-ups” and working on mastering them.

One thing I found apparent is our youth re so “screwed up” because their imperfect parents are. We can best help our children and grandchildren by doing all we can to open ourselves up and dissever our own problems, realize them, admit to them and do all we can to “transform” ourselves by following methods to eliminate them.

The only negative I experienced with this book is I feel too many “midlife” scenarios were put into one book. I feel like the therapeutic methods – both mental and physical issues need to be separate from her personal family relationships.

This book will be one that each can reference in finding what will work best for each of us  individually. This is a mold for obtaining true freedom and self worth!

I offer a Four Stars rating

This book was gifted me with no pressure to post a positive review. This is my honest review

Writing Memoir as a Healing Process By Donna Roe Daniell

Writing a memoir is a very unique writing experience. Often as I began writing about the six major transitional events that happened in my midlife years starting with the birth of my son at 39 in which I developed severe post-partum depression, I had no idea where I would end writing about parts of my life story.

Over the course of the three and a half years as I wrote alone and in groups of women who were also writing, I focused on expressing what I was feeling and experiencing while going through these challenges. I focused on just telling my “Truth” of what I remember happened and what I remember feeling. This process of writing my story allowed me to explore the roles and attitudes I went through being a woman, a wife, a mother and at some moments, a little girl. It was healing for me to step out of my role and job as psychotherapist and coach and just be a woman.

When I asked for editorial support, in my third year of writing, I was advised by my developmental editor that I had a valuable message for other women in midlife and that my memoir could be really powerful if I narrowed my “arc of the story” to these midlife events.

As I followed that advice and continued writing the final stories of that arc of time: My mother’s death and funeral and the process of grieving many of these losses after my second divorce at age 62, I realized there was so much more coming forth that I didn’t yet understand. In other words, the focused writing took me  deeper into my psyche and taught me how to hold myself deeply and compassionately in my despair and messiness.

As the final writing process unfolded, I was writing from a place that I hadn’t met in myself before—a deep place of knowing that guided me further. I didn’t know that this book was going to be about my relationship with my mother until I was in the final year of writing. This has always been a challenging part of my life and even in her death and afterwards, I had not gone deeply into what my inner parts were holding. In other words, my deeper interpersonal trauma was awakened through sitting and feeling the feelings I experienced over and over in interactions with my mom –the good feelings and the troubling feelings. Together, they were totally unresolved and so, to my surprise, I found myself telling
the stories of being with her, her being with me as I parented, me being with her as she
suffered her stroke– to try to resolve it somehow.

Now, a year later after writing and publishing this memoir, I have been able to find more resolution and healing with more trauma therapy and loving buddhist teachers.

My final editing process was painful for me because I really had to wrestle with changing names and not causing harm to those I had written  about in my stories. I am sure everyone reaches a point in writing their memoir that this issue arises. I am glad that I did not address this issue until I had written my whole memoir and was looking back at the final editing stage, so that I was able to truly tell my story first. The most important person who gave me final approval to write and publish this memoir was my son, who was a main character throughout. We were able to heal much of our relationship through the dialogue and process we created together to finalize the parts of these stories that were about him.

Throughout the time that I was writing my memoir, I was simultaneously leading other men and women in a monthly Memoir Writing Class. Over these past three years, I have seen how each person was slowly finding his/her own path and how valuable that path is to reaching the unique memoir for each person.

My own experience of being guided and supported in my process with coaches and other women writers has helped me to offer my facilitation to this group. In the process of coaching and witnessing others, I learned more about the power of this genre and how many different ways it can heal us.

This genre of memoir is powerful and revealing – and it teaches us so much about what is just below the surface, if we open up what is coming from within us fully and courageously.