Overcoming Mental and Emotional Obstacles
by Christie Ann Watson
Freedom is a journey, not a destination. That’s the theme running through Finding My Path to Freedom: Overcoming Mental and Emotional Obstacles by Christie Ann Watson. This short book – the Kindle version is only 75 pages long – is an inspiring autobiographical account of triumph over trauma. Christie Watson is a good friend and a sister in Christ, so I was excited when I heard she was writing a book. I was not disappointed. Because of our friendship, I recognize that my opinion of her book can not be completely unbiased. However, I have tried to be as objective as possible, and I did not show Christie this review before posting (although she knew I would be writing it).
The book begins with the author’s birth, as the third child of a teenaged single mother. For many years Christie’s mother hid her father’s identity from her, and from him, out of fear of losing custody. Growing up in southern California, surrounded by poverty, violence and drugs, she became desensitized to trauma. Christie tells a heartbreaking story of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, including one especially horrific scene (which I won’t reveal here) that occurred when she was seven. She began drinking and smoking marijuana when she was only nine, and became sexually active as a young teen. In addition, throughout much of Christie’s life, she has struggled with being overweight. Convinced that the only way to survive was never to show weakness, she developed what she calls her “poker face.”
There were, admittedly, good times as well as bad in Christie’s childhood, many of them related to the church she was able to attend. But the overall picture of the first part of her life is of a girl who was not valued by either herself or by the people who should have loved and cared for her. Internalized abuse led Christie to make bad decisions, which all too often led to further abuse.
It was at a church Bible study, to which she’d been invited by two friends, that Christie’s life began to turn around. At the time she was eighteen and pregnant, and her first step to freedom was moving out of the apartment where she’d been living with her boyfriend and her sister. Choosing that different path seems to have been a catalyst that helped Christie begin to unravel the layers of fear, shame and insecurity that she had built up. Through her church she later met, and eventually married, the man who has been her husband for the past twenty-five years. In the last few chapters of the book, Christie describes her gradual journey of healing the wounds of her past. And as she emphasizes throughout her account, this is indeed a journey, a process, rather than a destination.
It’s in this last section that the book’s biggest weakness appears. Up to this point, the author has been describing specific events from her childhood and youth. We share her experiences and witness how they affected her. After the turning point Bible study, however, she mostly uses metaphors to describe her journey toward healing. She “grabbed the truth by the hand and started walking,” and realized that her “mentality, behaviors, and unprocessed erratic emotions needed to be filtered and processed through the lens of truth.” The language is powerful and evocative, but it’s also somewhat distancing. I would liked to have seen more of the specific events that defined this part of Christie’s journey.
At the end of the book is a bonus chapter about the complexity of communication between people. It highlights, in the author’s words, “information, perspectives, and tools I picked up along the way that have aided my journey to freedom.”