Root. Rise. Roar Book

Root, Rise, Roar: Transforming Trauma into Your Brave and Beautiful Life is a study that rests on Dawn King's career in behavioral psychology, offering an approach to life and recovery that promotes mindfulness, emotional healing, and resilience.

Root, Rise, Roar: Transforming Trauma into Your Brave and Beautiful Life

Root, Rise, Roar: Transforming Trauma into Your Brave and Beautiful Life is a study that rests on Dawn King's career in behavioral psychology, offering an approach to life and recovery that promotes mindfulness, emotional healing, and resilience.

Rather than promoting King's own approaches, Root, Rise, Roar represents a collaborative mix of her insights and those of her clients, documenting the varied processes by which survival becomes revival.

King's mother chose alcohol as a salve to hide her pain. She was "was injured by a partner who betrayed and pulverized her emotionally and mentally," and her reaction to life created a distance from her family that led to profound emotional wounds on all sides before alcohol was finally set aside.

King acknowledges both the legacy of family patterns and the power available to everyone to break them:

"Looking back on my life, I see how my parents’ traumas, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviours were transferred to me on very unconscious and seductively subtle levels. While genetics are undeniably inherited, I believe the learned behaviours of our parents or caregivers and environments as children have a constructive and destructive effect on us. We can also change them."

Root, Rise, Roar does more than document this path of destruction and rebuilding. It provides a diverse set of keys to better understanding these chains and how best to break them, drawing important connections through seemingly simple approaches to revising life. These evolve on as basic a level as learning how to slow down and what to do with this added time, as well as how best to place a value on it:

"Slowing down allows more intentional awareness of making decisions. Impulse control is a problem in our culture, yet slowing down expands creative thinking and provides a space and place within us of making and planning for possibilities. Doing more doesn’t always equal doing our best."

As new possibilities evolve from addressing and challenging familiar patterns of behavior and responses to life, the real potential of learning to live not faster, but better, are explored in a self-help inspirational guide especially recommended for high achievers who often approach their goals too measuredly or hastily.

Libraries and readers seeking a guide that introduces the paths to better living will find the clear advice in Root, Rise, Roar an inspirational key to building alternative choices in life.

"So many of us have not grown up with any emotional fluency." Here is where the envisioning lessons begin, in a lesson plan that deconstructs the inherent rigidity of family patterns and negative impulses:

"As we understand the difference between constructive and destructive behaviors, avoiding leaves our roots rotting in denial. We cannot grow from there. We destructively ROOT and rigidly do not change, causing anxiety, depression, addiction, and other destructive behaviours we have the power to change."

Root, Rise, Roar's ability to illustrate the process of embracing this power makes it a top recommendation for readers and book groups interested in discussing and enacting new rules for living life in a different way.

Muse Literary (2023)
ISBN: 978-1958714539
Reviewed by Lily Andrews for Reader Views (05/2023)