All five of us in our family were harmed by Mom’s inability to be empathetic to us. And as a result, we took that baggage and impacted ourselves and others. Leo Tolstoy said, “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in it’s own way.”

Set in upstate South Carolina, Kathryn Purcell’s memoir gives an honest retelling of her life, as she narrates the story of her dysfunctional family including a mother with covert narcissism and a sister with bi polar disorder. You will meet colorful characters that became instrumental in her life. Some were positive while others left lasting scars.

At turns uproariously funny and heartbreakingly sad, There’s Something Wrong With Us, is the story of a daughter dealing with generations of mental illness, sudden loss and profound grief and finally her journey to healing.

My memoir, There’s Something Wrong With Us: A Daughter’s Story of Mental Illness, Loss and Healing, tells the story of how I survived and eventually healed from such an experience.  My parents were well-educated but twelve years apart in age, with distinctly different backgrounds. Dad was raised to be the bread winner and Mom was expected to rear the kids. That arrangement was a petri dish for the lack of nurturing my two other siblings and I experienced growing up. Starting at an early age, my sister exhibited aggressive behavior that worsened as she got older.

My self-absorbed mother found parenting her a challenge and gave up on the rest of our family to dedicate more time to her. Mom’s controlling nature kept us from bonding with others outside our immediate family, so we each developed our own coping strategies to deal with her abuse. Each was different, but the internal result was the same: emotionally starved kids in need of love and validation.

I have struggled much of my life with feeling wounded easily by others, believing my need for their approval was necessary for me to like myself. After countless times hearing me describe my hurtful family life, my husband suggested I write this book. I took his suggestion, and the result is There’s Something Wrong With Us: A Daughter’s Story of Mental Illness, Loss and Healing.

I wrote it partly to acknowledge the hardships I overcame but mainly to focus on the positive impact many people have had on my spirit. It’s easy to dwell on the negative, but it’s far more powerful to focus on the positive influence from those who helped me grow into the person I am. A life-saving sense of humor also helped me to not take myself and my life too seriously, shaping my optimistic nature and made it easy for me to bond readily with people. Although I still contend with self-doubt, I do not allow it to consume me for long.

My research on narcissistic mothers has led me to believe these women are raising daughters who choose not to have children. As one of those daughters, I can say we fear being like our mothers and inflicting the same harm on our own children as was done to us. I hope by sharing this story with others, women who have similar stories will realize they are not alone. I believe that although we daughters of abusive mothers may always hurt from that toxic relationship, we can find strategies to more easily cope with the baggage.