Synopses & Reviews
Twenty years ago, Holly Smith didn't know how drastically her life would change when she joined the Sexual Abuse Team in Boulder, Colorado. What she first considered a temporary job became a gut-wrenching, but ultimately satisfying quest that touched hundreds of children's lives.
Fire of the Five Hearts is Smith's unflinching account of her work with victims of incest, a crime that affects one in five children. In stark, elegant prose, Smith immerses us in the grueling details of her tiny patients' lives, punctuating the accounts with her own range of emotions: disgust, shock, anger, guilt, joy at victory tempered by sadness of innocence lost.
There is nothing pretty or clean here, and Smith relates with utter honesty the toll this work takes on her as a therapist and as a person. She expresses the rage, as well as the strange compassion she feels towards incest offenders; the surrealism of reading sexually explicit, stomach-turning reports every day; the raw, painful process of prying open the soul of a child; and the uncompromising passion that has sustained her in this work for two decades.
In the face of a crime that sends us reeling, Fire of the Five Hearts breaks through the secrecy and silence to find hope for both victims and healers.
Synopsis
This book is about the influence of twenty years of work in the field of incest on a therapist's professional and personal life. It is comprised of individual cases, and touches upon topics including spirituality, sex between siblings, counter-transference, and incest teams. The author shares, in unadulterated prose, her experience as an incest therapist. This important, courageous work touches upon issues important to and resonant for mental health professionals treating incest and sexual abuse as well as the incest survivor or survivor's family member.