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Raised by Emotional Ghosts: An Illustrated Book for Daughters Who Wonder If They Deserved Better Parents
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 16 2026
Pages: 116
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.28 Width: 5.25 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
They didn't hit you. They weren't cruel. But something was never quite right, and you've always known it.
They changed the subject when you cried. They called you too sensitive. They never apologized. They loved you, and somehow they were never really there when you needed them most.
For years, you wondered if you were the problem. Too much. Too dramatic. Or maybe every family was just like this. So you swallowed the doubt, second-guessed your own memory, and felt a flash of guilt every time a small voice insisted something was wrong.
That voice was right.
In Raised by Emotional Ghosts, illustrator and ADHD advocate Alice Gendron gives a name to the parents who are physically present and emotionally absent, the ones who vanish the instant a feeling gets too close. Through her own story and the lives of two women whose childhoods may look unsettlingly like yours, she reveals the four hidden patterns every Emotional Ghost falls into, why some of us are wired to absorb them most deeply, and how the doubt finally lifts once you can see the pattern for yourself.
This is not a textbook and not a lecture. Every page is illustrated, intimate, and disarmingly honest, more like reading a friend's journal than a self-help manual. It asks nothing of your parents and everything of your own clarity.
By the last page, three things will have shifted. You'll understand that you were never the problem. You'll stop wondering whether you're being unfair, because your gut was telling the truth all along. And you'll stop feeling guilty for finally questioning the people who raised you.
Gendron writes not as a therapist or a researcher, but as someone still in the thick of it.
You deserved better. This is the book that helps you see it.
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