Besides our natural avoidance to pain, the author says we often neglect to see the truth because of family fictions. Most families - and all dysfunctional ones - harbor dangerous fictions that keep us from uncovering reality. As children, these fictions may protect us against truths that are too horrible to bear, but as adults we must uncover the truth through conversations with family members and lots of soul searching. Upon debunking these fictional family stories (such as describing a father with a gambling addiction as a man who has bad luck in business), we can rewrite our futures and stop the cycle from moving on to the next generation.

Ablow writes with an appealing conversational style and uses an easy-to-understand dialogue with the reader. You get the feeling that he really enjoys helping his patients. Each chapter concludes with fill-in-the-blank questions that encourage readers to delve into their own tragic stories. If you have already benefited from psychotherapy, you may not find these questions all that challenging, although you’re still likely to glean some insight from the information contained in the chapters. Some problems, of course, will be too complex to solve through this one-size-fits-all question format. The questions (and the overall content of the book) should be most beneficial to readers with previously unexamined lives.