You have just reached the end of your rope. Is there any more reason to hope? Many women deal with troubling challenges that burden them such as: * Facing the sad woman in the mirror * Struggling with health concerns * Trying to be strong for someone else * Coping with the pain of broken relationships * Experiencing life's losses Where could a woman like you braving through health, family, career, self-esteem and other personal issues turn to for help? Luisa Reyes-Ampil shares her own experiences and those of other women whose lives were turned upside down when difficulties came. Brimming with inspiring and practical advice, this book will lead you to where you can find the answers. Life may feel like it's falling apart but you can still remain whole. No matter what your circumstances tell you, there's hope for survival and victory.

Add layoffs, foreclosures, and skyrocketing health-care costs to the inevitable crises of every life, and you have today’s landscape. Amid these challenges, even those who thought they had solid coping skills feel that their center cannot hold as things fall apart. In her first book in many years, bestselling author Daphne Rose Kingma takes us on a path of emotional and spiritual healing, with particular attention to the complex and frequently overwhelming circumstances of our lives right now. The perfect combination of empathic friend, sage counselor, savvy problem solver, and even gallows humorist, Kingma looks straight into the predicaments so many of us face. She then offers ten deceptively simple yet profoundly effective strategies for coping on practical, emotional, and spiritual levels. The devastating events cannot be changed, but after reading this book, you will be, having recovered a sense of equanimity, spirit, and strength. Whether you’re struggling with money issues, job loss, relationship problems, an unexpected health crisis, or all of the above, this book will light your path and heal your heart.

In a heartbreak-illiterate world, Handbook for the Heartbroken offers solace and support through personal and collective losses of all kinds—including the end of a relationship or a job, death of a loved one, a natural disaster, infertility, abortion, a financial crisis, or any other form of loss. Heartbreak sends us reeling—we can feel alone and adrift. After her own experience of serial heartbreaks over the span of five years, Sara Avant Stover felt deeply impacted by our culture’s dysfunctional relationship with loss—especially for women. “We’re encouraged at every turn to hurry up and get on with it,” she says. “But by trying to power through these messier seasons of life, we’re denying ourselves the very answers to our healing and growth.” With Handbook for the Heartbroken, Sara offers the grounded guidance she needed during her own falls from grace to help you navigate loss and turmoil. Blending her expertise in Internal Family Systems and various wisdom traditions, she examines the three main phases of heartbreak: devastation, transformation, and rebirth. With each phase, she shares gentle lessons and supportive practices for anyone experiencing the unthinkable, including: • An exploration of nuanced emotions associated with heartbreak and grief—ranging from early stages of shock, anger, and pain to healing spaces of forgiveness and restoring trust • Relevant and relatable stories from the author and her clients, creating a road map for your unique healing journey • Practices and journal prompts to create a safe container to digest your experiences of heartbreak, both past and present, more fully • An invitation for finding a way forward both as individuals and as members of a community to draw on support of trusted friends and family “Heartbreak is an inevitable part of everyone’s life journey,” says Sara. “It’s by returning to our essential qualities like patience, openheartedness, and trust that we can truly heal.” Handbook for the Heartbroken can be your trustworthy friend through the hardest seasons of life, helping you embrace change and “become a fully wise, mature, integrated human being.”

An analysis of the literature and of the author's own research on female alcoholics that uses the concept of status insularity to expand labeling theory within the field of the sociology of deviance.

DIV Whether you are dealing with the unexpected death of a loved one, betrayal by someone close to you, sudden divorce, loss of a home, failure of a business or relationship, or any other serious issue, with God’s help you can turn your trial into triumph./div

This book traces the development of the modern short story in the hands of Irish women writers from the 1890s to the present. George Egerton, Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright and Claire Keegan are only some of the many Irish women writers who have made lasting contributions to the genre of the modern short story - yet their achievements have often been marginalized in literary histories, which typically define the Irish short story in terms of its oral heritage, nationalist concerns, rural realism and outsider-hero. Through a detailed investigation of the short fiction of fifteen prominent writers, this study aims to open up this critical conceptualization of the Irish short story to the formal properties and thematic concerns women writers bring to the genre. What stands out in thematic terms is an abiding interest in human relations, whether of love, the family or the larger community. In formal terms, this book traces the overall development of the Irish short story, highlighting both the lines of influence that connect these writers and the specific use each individual author makes of the short story form.

The well-known archaeologist Marija Gimbutas found through her excavations and research in Europe from prehistoric times, that there have been societies that lived in peace for millennia, and where the highest deity was feminine. Gimbutas believed women played a central role in the religions and society of what she called ancient Europe. In societies where the goddess was the supreme deity, life was celebrated - not death, and men and women were equal. People lived in harmony with nature and built their cities on fertile plains. The knowledge of a possible peaceful society where the goddess ruled and where the union between man and woman was sacred has made women and men believe that a better world is possible. On this background Clementz and Forbord try to find traces of the Great Goddess in symbolism that recurs in myths and fairy tales. The book reproduces a selection of these and sheds new light on them with the help of religious historical theory. We join the goddess Inanna to the underworld, hear the legend of Kuan Yin, follow the tracks of the black Madonnas, investigate the Grail mysteries, look into the Great Goddess of the North and see fairy tales about true love in a new light. The interested reader can look forward to many moments of realization in the company of the authors and their interpretations of known and unknown myths and fairy tales - all from a female perspective. Ingvild Forbord is a teacher with a major in the history of religion. Marit Clementz is a teacher and professional storyteller. Together they run the Women ́s Academy, which organizes workshops and travels related to the themes in this book. They have an online course called Eve`s Apples and lead Wise Women Circles online once a month.

This second edition of Lucky Strikes and a Three Martini Lunch: Thinking About Television’s Mad Men explores the attributes of the AMC series that allow it to be such a popular and vital contribution to contemporary cultural discourse. Set in the 1960s in New York, the Emmy and Peabody-winning series follows the competitive, seductive, and oftentimes ruthless lives of the men and women of Madison Avenue’s advertising agencies. Many alluring and captivating qualities constitute the Mad Men experience: the way it evokes nostalgia, even from those who did not live in the era being portrayed; its interrogations of identities, and how these explorations of the past illuminate viewers’ concepts of the present; the compelling (and often heartbreaking) relationships between characters trying to make their way in an ever-changing and increasingly complex world; and the titillation of the characters’ discovery of the power of mass-mediated communication and its abilities to allow learning, information sharing, manipulation, and connection, not to mention how their journeys reflect our own in contemporary society. The essays collected in this volume speak to both fans of the show who may not typically embrace theory and criticism, as well as those who do. Additionally, this version was designed with educators in mind. It still includes engaging essays that critically analyze the show from a multitude of perspectives, but now they are organized in way to facilitate easy use in the classroom. This structure allows educators to simply construct and conduct a course using this book as a primary textbook and organize the course according to the way it is laid out. Each chapter provides any type of reader with the opportunity to think about and enjoy the show even after it is no longer on the air.

More and more pulpits are occupied by motivational speakers rather than preachers. Church congregations are not being given a comprehensive, biblical understanding of the faith. Drawing on his own experience as a pastor in Zambia, Conrad Mbewe tackles issues such as the content of pastoral preaching, how pastoral preaching relates to church life, finding the time to prepare pastoral sermons, and dealing with discouragement. Throughout the book, it is clear that the author’s conviction is to see preachers grow strong churches, to build a people for God.