To Be Loved: A Memoir

Rarely does a trauma therapist disclose their own trauma history . . . yet it's the untold, brutally honest, incredibly heartbreaking story of Dr. Frank Anderson that made him the world-renowned trauma expert he is today. Known for his magnetic and radiant personality, Frank spends his time training thousands of clinicians around the world on how to help clients with complex trauma make sense of their suffering. But underneath this charismatic exterior are his dark family secrets, including the marks of child abuse from his father and the invisible scars of shame. His colleagues and fellow therapists would never know this . . . until now. In To Be Loved, Frank shares his confusing experience of growing up an outsider in a typical midwestern Italian American home that was at one turn fiercely loving but at the same time unaccepting, abusive, and rife with secrets. After enduring six years of therapy as a child in the 1970s, he was programmed to be something that he wasn't for decades, and he became driven to create the perfect life--complete with a family, a successful career, and a house with a white picket fence in the suburbs--until it all fell apart. It was only then that he realized resilience, forgiveness, and facing his trauma were the keys to living an authentic life--and finally knowing what it feels like to be loved.