January 30, 2025
Stop Shaming Yourself:
Heal Your Trauma and Abuse by Forgiving and Loving Your Life
Joy Alboro
Aviva Publishing (2023)
ISBN: 978-1636182391
New Book Offers Tools for Healing Shame and Abuse
Joy Alboro’s Stop Shaming Yourself: Heal Your Trauma and Abuse by Forgiving and Loving Your Life is a dynamic new book about how change is possible even for those who have suffered the most. Part memoir, part recovery book for those who have experienced abuse, Stop Shaming Yourself will make even those who feel the most shame or believe themselves the most undeserving of love find hope and practical tools to overcome their pasts and learn to live new and happier lives.
I admit some of this book is hard to take. It is not for the faint-hearted. Those of us who have not been abused may find parts of it hard to stomach, but those who have been abused will realize Joy understands what they’ve been through, and that is precisely why she can help them.
Each chapter begins with Joy sharing one of the horrific stories of her childhood. Joy was one of eight children, all of whom suffered abuse at the hands of her father. Her mother was also abused by her father, but what Joy finds hard to understand is why her mother allowed her father to abuse her children. In the end, Joy realized her mother allowed the abuse to protect herself. And the abuse was horrendous. Her father didn’t just rant and hit. He raped his daughters, performing abortions and murder on them. You can’t possibly make this stuff up. Joy’s story reads like a true horror novel, but it’s not fiction. Joy lived every minute of it.
However, Joy does not share the horror so the reader can be thrilled by the sensationalism. Nor does she do it to point fingers and blame. She isn’t looking to stay stuck in her past or wallow in her pain while hoping to get sympathy from her readers. She shares it to show people the extreme conditions that created the shame and low self-esteem she has had to overcome. She shares it to show how she learned powerful healing modalities to help her overcome the past. And most importantly, she shares it so others will have hope that they can heal as well.
Joy’s primary focus throughout the book is helping the reader to heal and giving them the tools they need to make that happen. For that reason, besides the stories of abuse, Joy shares her stories of how she learned to heal in different ways, and she offers the many tools she used to do so. In fact, each chapter is divided into a top ten list of the different ways to heal related to the specific chapter, such as how to forgive, how to learn to trust again, and how to find inner peace. In addition, Joy offers self-love ritual exercises to share the many processes she’s used to become whole and happy again.
Joy has gone from wondering if God could even exist since a loving God would not allow the abuse she endured to happen to becoming a spiritual person who has learned that her soul-level mission is to share how she overcame her abuse, anger, and pain to help others to heal.
But healing is not easy, and Joy knows that. She has gone through countless years of therapy. She held onto anger for decades because she was unable to forgive. And she has had to overcome the ways she learned she was getting in the way of her own recovery. She knows that healing can be easier than what she experienced, but she didn’t have the tools to heal when she began. She wrote this book so others can have those tools right away and not have to suffer as long as she did. She even developed multiple personalities to protect her, and she shares how eventually she was able to integrate those personalities back into her. Suicide was a daily option for her. She tried to commit suicide at least seven times and only failed because she believes angels stepped in to save her. Now she knows God had other plans for her.
Ultimately, Joy learned to forgive. It was the hardest part of her healing journey, but she tells us, “After learning to truly love myself, I knew I had to learn to forgive both myself and the abusers…. When I discovered forgiveness, the shame stopped.” Forgiving her father was extremely difficult for Joy. It took his dying for her to reach full forgiveness, for then she knew he could not hurt anyone else. It also took her learning about her father’s past and also seeing where all his dysfunctional behavior led him. In the book, she shares exactly how forgiveness became possible for her.
And once she forgave her father, Joy felt healed and was able to start sharing her story. She has done so through public speaking and by coaching others to overcome abuse, pain, and shame. In fact, in 2018, she received the “Hawaii Forgiveness Hero Award” for how she has shown others the way to forgiveness and healing.
Today, Joy is on a mission to help others. She has become a life coach, healer, forgiveness facilitator, and now an author. Through the pages of Stop Shaming Yourself, she hopes to help more people than she could just through her practice. The book is a great place to start your journey to a better life, one where you can finally let the past bury itself and focus on your future, one where your inner child can come home again because your soul is whole and healed and you have stopped shaming yourself. That is what Joy wishes for you, and so do I.
For more information about Joy Alboro and Stop Shaming Yourself, visit www.JoyAlboro.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and The Best Place
