Releasing The Emotional Wound – Gina Goldfeder, Ph.D.

Review by Christa Gumede Buthelezi

We hear so much about wounded healers, trauma, wounding, and more, but I wonder how many of us truly understand the root of these scars and just how they affect our daily lives. I’m delighted to share with you a very approachable book on this very issue, and hope that it will reach many people in order to bring light to an often misunderstood facet of being human.

Warm, compassionate, insightful, and clear, Releasing the Emotional Wound is both inspirational and practical — an excellent guide for looking at your own wounds and processing them. In this slim yet powerful volume, Gina Goldfeder shares both her professional knowledge as a psychologist and her personal path of exploring her own emotional wounds and using them to change her experience of life.

As someone who has worked with trauma both personally and professionally for decades, I can highly recommend this as an educational and liberating tool in the recovery and transformational process so many of us seek.

Goldfeder summarizes her intent beautifully on the very first page:

“In over 30 years of working with patients…I have concluded that the path to healing is always to stop fleeing from the wound, and instead, to know it, honour it, and transcend it.”

She goes on to say:

“This book aims to explain what the process of releasing the wound is like, in terms of turning it into an opportunity for life – to be reborn from what you thought you would never rise from.”

She continues in the first chapters to define the wound and wounding itself, sharing her own stories as well as examples from current television shows to ancient Greek mythology. The diverse references — including a couple of phrases in isiZulu! — allow every reader to easily identify with the author’s points as she illustrates the wide range of ways wounding can manifest.

While the entire book is full of practical tips, tools, and insights, the middle section is particularly devoted to hands-on and easily accessible ways to release your wounds amid day-to-day life. The references range from philosophers you may be quite familiar with, to ancient Sanskrit mantras, to Jungian and other psychological examples.

The author shares, too, her own therapeutic rituals and guidelines for creating bespoke ones from wherever you might find yourself on your path. There’s a beautiful chapter on amulets, or healing objects — something which is not often mentioned in texts despite the comfort human beings have found in them for centuries. As throughout the book, guidelines are provided along with clinical cases which highlight the power of these tools.

The section ends with journaling — another incredibly insightful method often not delved into in the ways Dr. Goldfeder shares in Releasing the Emotional Wound.

The third section is all about “Being in Life.” Dr. Goldfeder wraps up the book by inviting the reader to take what she has shared and make it their own. Chapter fifteen is titled “Creating a New Identity,” encouraging us to find our own unique expression of our soul’s mission in life in a concise and clear way.

I do hope many will accept this invitation — what a world it would be if many of us found our way home to ourselves. Perhaps the closing sentences of the book sum it up best:

“The pilgrimage of healing is the most profound opportunity we can approach in life. To release the wound will guide us back to the true home we should never have left.”