For the first time a book gives parents the framework to name a feeling that millions of them have been carrying in complete silence.

Not exhaustion. Not postpartum depression. Not the challenge of a difficult child or a hard season of parenting. The specific, targeted, bewildering feeling that some parents carry toward a particular child. The one that arrives in their presence before a word has been spoken or a demand has been made. The one that coexists with genuine love in ways that make no logical sense. The one that has lived without a name, without a community, and without a single safe place to take it.

Until now.

Most books in this space name the reader's experience for her and hand her a clinical label as if the naming itself is the healing. This book does something more powerful. It gives the reader the psychological safety, the honest framework, the scientific grounding, and the spiritual wisdom to name her own experience in her own language for the very first time. Because the most powerful naming is the one the reader does herself. A name handed to her is a verdict. A name she arrives at through her own honest work is a key. And what she names she can heal.

This book was written simultaneously for two readers. The parent who has never been able to say this out loud to anyone. And the adult who grew up knowing that something was missing in the way a parent looked at them. In many families these are the same person. The rejected child who grew up, had her own children, and found herself in the middle of a cycle that has never been named let alone healed. This book speaks to both of them at once.

Author Shaffa is herself a rejected child and a mother of five who discovered after having her own children that the wound she believed was healed had surfaced in her parenting in ways she was not prepared for. She wrote this book from the other side of the healing with the authority that only lived experience produces. Her own healing is the proof of concept for everything this book offers.

The book introduces two original frameworks. The Love Trinity of Will, Action, and Energy explains why blocked love is not absent love and what it actually takes to unblock it. The Relay Race of Healing maps the generational transmission of this wound and shows why one person's healing changes every generation that follows.

Drawing on the ACE Study, Dr. Bruce Perry's research on childhood trauma and brain development, Dr. Rachel Yehuda's epigenetics work on intergenerational trauma, the HeartMath Institute's studies on the electromagnetic field of the heart, and Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory, the book provides rigorous scientific grounding for experiences that have previously existed only in shame and silence.

This is not a book you read and set aside. It is a book you work with.

Woven through every chapter are tools designed to move the healing from the page into the body and into the relationship.

Each chapter closes with a personal reflection practice that guides the reader to examine her own specific experience rather than receive a generalised conclusion. These are not abstract prompts. They are precise, honest questions that bring the reader into direct contact with what she has been carrying and what it is connected to in her own history.

Journaling exercises throughout the book give the reader a private space to name, trace, and process what the reading surfaces. Writing is one of the most powerful tools available for healing what has never been spoken and these exercises are designed to take the reader from intellectual understanding into felt and embodied knowing.

Somatic and body-based practices are integrated across Part Four and Part Five. The body carries the wound long before the mind can articulate it and these practices address the felt residue of the experience directly. Breath work, body awareness exercises, and grounding practices give the reader a way to work with what lives in the nervous system and not only in the mind.

Meditative and spiritual practices woven through Part Three and Part Five offer the reader a way into the deeper dimensions of the wound and the healing. These are optional and non-prescriptive. The reader takes what serves her and leaves what does not.

By the time a reader reaches the final page she will not only understand what she has been carrying. She will have named it in her own language. She will have traced its roots through her own history. She will have begun the somatic and emotional work of releasing it. And she will have a daily practice of peace to carry forward into every relationship that follows.

The book moves across five parts. The Wound No One Names. The Parent's Truth. The Soul Dimension. The Path of Self-Love. The Healing.

Comparable titles include Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson, It Did Not Start With You by Mark Wolynn, Running on Empty by Jonice Webb, and The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. What distinguishes this book from every one of them is that none directly address the specific targeted feeling some parents carry toward a particular child, and none give the reader the active healing tools to name and transform it in her own language on her own terms.

The love was never absent. It was blocked. And what is blocked can be unblocked.

Publication Date: July 2026

Publisher: Peace with Shaffa

Pre-order: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX52VLSK

Author website: peace.peacewithshaffa.com

Review copies available. Contact: peace@peacewithshaffa.com