Pizzolato

Literary Titan book review

The 10 Elements of Transformational Healing: How to Rebuild Your Life After Trauma by Eugene Pizzolato is a book about generational trauma and human development, or rather a lack of providing for a child’s development in the early stages of life and how this affects the individual’s entire perspective on life, as well as taking a step towards healing yourself and breaking generational ＂curses.＂

This thought-provoking book is almost completely biographical with Pizzolato starting his story way before he was born. His story starts almost a century ago in Italy in 1929 where his grandmother got pregnant out of wedlock for the second time and thus his father was born. His father had a difficult childhood and early life with an inattentive mother which later on led him to be a similar father. Eugene himself had a tough upbringing from the very second, he was born, with his mother wishing that he had been a girl. Growing up in an abusive household with an alcoholic father and a mother who tried to commit suicide a couple of times, the death of a baby sister, and his pet lamb being killed in order to be eaten as dinner, are just a few stories he tells in the book. His stories continue into his adult life and him feeling all sorts of confused, unimportant, unlovable, and more, as well as the long road of his healing process and breaking generational trauma.

What I really appreciate about this emotionally stirring book, as a reader and as a psychology student, is that Pizzolato isn’t just sharing his experience and what he has learned from it, he is also mentioning and quoting important names in developmental psychology, most importantly Erik Erikson and his 8 stages in human development. In addition to that, the book is well written and filled with so much heart, pain, and growth that it will definitely leave you thinking about the author’s experience and even more so your own.

The 10 Elements of Transformational Healing is a wonderful read, I especially recommend it to psychology and psychiatry students. I find it to be really helpful in better understanding the developmental needs and what a lack thereof can do to a young child and the effects it carries throughout life.