Exclusive Excerpt: Shelter from Our Secrets, Silence & Shame

As a mental health clinician, Rebecca Brown has been a safe place for many to seek shelter from their secrets, silence and shame. Inspired to finally slow down, stop running from herself and share her own story, she found ways to seek and savour her own shelter.

Welcome to one of the May 12th stop on the blog tour for Shelter from Our Secrets, Silence, and Shame by Rebecca L. Brown with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, more exclusive content, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.

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About the Book

Shelter from Our Secrets, Silence, and Shame
How Our Stories Can Keep Us Stuck or Set Us Free
by Rebecca L. Brown

Published 6 January 2022
Tellwell Talent

Genre: Non-Fiction, Self Help, Personal Growth
Page Count: 336
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

As a mental health clinician, Rebecca Brown has been a safe place for many to seek shelter from their secrets, silence and shame. Inspired to finally slow down, stop running from herself and share her own story, she found ways to seek and savour her own shelter.

Rebecca’s personal journey takes us through sadness, tragedy, self-sabotage, the impossible pursuit of perfection, distorted thinking and eating, engaging with her shadow self, divorce, and numbing with alcohol, all in an attempt to avoid the story needing to be shared.

Dispelling the limiting beliefs we hold about ourselves can unlock our limitless potential to reach goals we never dared to dream. From the Boston Marathon to working with horses, Rebecca sets out to prove to herself that anything is possible when you don’t listen to the negative stories you tell yourself.

Everyone has a story. We become who we are because of what has happened to us, and because of the stories we tell ourselves. But do our stories continue to serve us well, or keep us stuck? Are our stories fact or fiction? Is it time to rewrite the versions we have been telling ourselves?

Shelter provides strategies to help reframe the thinking patterns we have developed, and offers tools to recognize when we are suffering from our own thoughts, feelings and actions. Resilience-building techniques are woven through the pages, and encouragement for the lifelong journey of collecting moments of awe and happiness.

Seeking and reading Shelter is a gift of self-compassion and self-discovery. Rebecca’s hope is that it will be read with a highlighter in hand, pages folded down, re-read, recommended to a friend, and used as a guide to start sharing our own stories with those we love.

We may not have written our beginnings, but we have the ability to write every word from this point forward and just imagine where our stories can take us when we are free of secrets, silence and shame.

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Exclusive Excerpt

CHAPTER SIX
2014
I never could have imagined what I would find when I started searching
my family’s ancestry online.
What I found was a
deep,
dark,
horrific,
tragic,
sad, secret, which my family knew nothing about.
Initially, I struggled with whether or not I should include this chapter.
This is not my own story.
It is my grandmother’s.
And she took it to her grave.
It may never have come to light
had I not started to search for stories.
What I found were secrets,
silence,
and shame.
I’ve worked for over thirty years in the field of trauma. I have degrees
and certifications to prove that I’m a specialist in helping with crisis
intervention and traumatic recovery. I can usually sense immediately when
someone is a survivor of something. And I like to think that I know how to
help and what to say. Yet I was speechless and felt helpless when I learned
about the tragedy buried deep within my own family. A secret that had
been hidden for over one hundred years.

It all began when I had a dream that I didn’t understand.
It was about a child.
I didn’t know who she was.
She was about eight years old.
She was wearing a white nightgown.
Something about her indicated she lived long ago.
But I knew that I knew her,
somehow.
She just stood there,
looking straight ahead,
and all she said was
“Share our story.”
I didn’t understand.
It stayed with me.
I couldn’t shake the vision in the dream.
Who was this child?
What was she trying to tell me?
What did she want me to do?
The child in my dream was my grandmother, my father’s mother, Ida Marion.
She had died twenty-seven years earlier;
she had just turned ninety.
I had just turned thirty.
She had lived to see me grow into a woman,
a wife,
a mother.
She also knew that I was a social worker
who worked with children
who had been abused,
neglected, or orphaned.
She had told me that she was proud of me.
She said, “The children are lucky to have you, Darling.”
I didn’t understand at the time,
how important that was to her.
So it is with the greatest respect, love, and care that I will do my best to
share her story, in the hope that it will help others to break their own
silence, share their secrets, and seek shelter from the shame. I truly hope
that she can rest in peace now.

I didn’t know much about my grandparents’ childhoods, other than that
my grandmother’s mother had died when she was a young child, and
she and her sisters had then been raised by extended family members.
That’s it.
That’s all I knew.
That’s all my family knew.
Until I started to search for more.
I decided to do an ancestry search to trace my family history.
I signed up for a two-week free trial, and I poured myself into the search
every spare moment I had on evenings and weekends. Initially I found
records of all the people I knew about. I edited all the cousins, first and
second, into my genogram program. I sent emails, called my mother,
father, and aunties and got details, dates of births and death, and a few
stories to fill in the gaps.
On my father’s side of the family, his mother, Ida Marion, was born in
England in 1903 and had been the fourth of five children. Tragically, her
mother died in childbirth.
And then I hit a dead end.
There was no information about anything else.
As I had understood, the five children had been sent to live with extended
family because their father was unable to raise them on his own.
Or so we thought.
We were not prepared for the information that we eventually uncovered.
My father helped with the search. He had been able to contact and follow up with some other sources in England and was then granted access to newspaper articles, school reports,
and hospital records. What he discovered was that some of the information
we had was accurate: my grandmother’s mother had in fact died during
childbirth with her eighth child. Two of her previous children had also
died as infants. She left behind five children ranging in age from eighteen
months to twelve years. My grandmother, Ida Marion, was five years old
when her mother died.
My great-grandfather, Thomas Oldbury Summers, was devastated by the
tragic death of his wife and their child, and he had also fallen into financial
hardship. He was now struggling to raise five young children and earn a
living in difficult times.
Shortly after his wife’s death,
He hired a housekeeper to help care for the five young children.
Her name was Lucilla.
Two years later he married her.
And two years later he killed her.
He tried to kill himself too
by cutting his own throat.
He survived, barely.

….Find out how this story ends and the impact it had on my grandmother’s life and the secret she kept buried for the rest of her life.

About the Author

REBECCA BROWN is a clinical social worker with over 35 years in practice ranging from medical social work, childhood trauma, vicarious trauma for first responders, international psychological first aid, and Equine Assisted Therapy. She is honoured to hold a faculty appointment with the Department of Family Medicine at Western University in London, Ontario. She teaches extensively on the topics of trauma and resilience and has delivered keynote presentations throughout North America. She shares her life and career with her husband, a family physician and trailblazer in the field of Lifestyle Medicine. Together they live and work on the shores of the Great Lake Huron, where they seek and share shelter with their six adult children, four grandchildren, extended family and friends, two dogs, two cats and one horse.

Website | Instagram | Amazon | Goodreads

Giveaway Alert!

Rebecca L. Brown, MSW, RSW will be awarding a $15 Amazon or B&N gift card to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.