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Love Letters from the Edge: Hope for the Hopeless
Four years ago, forty-eight year-old Wanda Sanchez was clinging to a life without hope. Every day was a struggle to stay alive. She’d planned her suicide and had every intent to carry out her plan.For decades she’d struggled with nightmares, flashbacks, addiction, self-abuse, compulsions, and other behaviors she simply couldn’t control.
Rehab was a failure.
Eating disorder clinics were a failure.
Counseling and therapy produced little change.
Year after year, her symptoms grew worse, and her prayers to be healed seemed to go unanswered.
Like most people, Wanda spent years treating symptoms, rather than treating her actual trauma.
The results? Imagine taking pain killers for your brain tumor. The pain might subside–for a time. But the tumor itself only continues to grow and the symptoms worsen. Wanda’s root problem–her trauma–was childhood abuse. repeated and horrific childhood abuse. But she didn’t know about trauma and PTSD. So she tried to relieve the symptoms–addictions, self-abuse, obsessive-compulsive disorders, nightmares, and flashbacks.
Like most people who experience trauma, Wanda struggled with guilt, abandonment, rage, despair, and other self-sabotaging emotions.
She felt ruined, unlovable, and was sure she was the only truly unfixable person in the world.
Until she went for ten days of out-patient trauma treatment that treated the root cause of her symptoms and changed her life forever.
Since leaving Intensive Trauma Therapy in 2011, Wanda and I (Shelly Beach) have dedicated ourselves to sharing our stories of hope and healing from post-traumatic stress disorder. We have both found life-altering healing from trauma symptoms that radically changed our lives. Wanda’s improvement was so profound that in the months following her treatment, therapists and organizations began to ask her to share her story. Our passion grew for helping people gain a practical understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and pointing them to resources for hope and healing.
Love Letters from the Edge: Meditations for Those Struggling with Brokenness, Trauma, and the Pain of Life is our first book together. It is an inspirational book of meditations for people longing to find hope and resources and who will benefit from a foundational understanding of PTSD.
Love Letters from the Edge will encourage those who’ve experienced suffering and who long to sense God’s presence and comfort.
Love Letters from the Edge has been endorsed by counselors and therapists, the directors of mental health centers and mission organizations (Wedgwood Christian Service, Dégagé Ministries, Music for the Soul, Hearts at Home, as well as media personalities and celebrities like Nancy Stafford and Kathie Lee Gifford.
Love Letters from the Edge may not be written for you. But it will touch the heart of someone you know who has experienced deep suffering in life and offer them hope, as well as practical tools for healing.
Who do you know who’s standing on the edge? Who do you know that needs to know they’re not alone?
Thank you for thei very important and informative article.
Today I tried to purchase “Love Letters from the Edge” book online. I understand from Amazon and other sites that this much awaited book has not yet been published!! Is this just in the UK?
I would be grateful if you would let me know if, indeed, it has been published and where I can buy it. Am hoping to obtain it asap.
With best wishes and thanks in anticipation,
Chris
Hi, Chris. “Love Letters” can be preordered on Amazon and will release on June 1st. We wish it was available right now. We’re receiving a lot of interest from those who are hearing about it, and it’s received enthusiastic endorsements. We’re hoping that people like you can help us get the word out that this resource is available. Thanks so much for your kind words.–Shelly and Wanda
Hi,
Thank you for your reply, have pre-ordered this book on Amazon and look forward to receiving it when published. In fact, cannot wait!! Am struggling desperately on my own with cPTSD. Have been on an NHS waiting list for therapy since December 2012. Am housebound, have awful medical problems (chronic, painful, debillitating and severe Fibromyalgia Syndrome and heart problems as well as the crippling horrific dreadful cPTSD symptoms). Am on so many prescribed medications (even opiates that I hate)which the doctors use as chemical coshes really, they actually exacerbate a lot of the distressing symptoms of cPTSD and make me even more anxious, depressed, debillitated, incapacitated and hopeless. Am so very, very low and depressed that all I want to do is die to escape this horrendous nightmare every single day and night, week after week, month after month. It’s getting worse as each day passes.
Noone in our NHS wants to know. Get dismissed and patronised constantly by GP’s and Consultants. PTSD has such negative and bad press here in UK (more so recently)that people believe that everyone with this illness is violent and/or abusive, even dangerous. The only person I ever hurt is me by self harming. Just can’t hold any of this in any longer hense this email to you. Sorry it’s so long.
I hope and pray that this message is confidential.
I am so very desperate to talk to someone who understands but am so very isolated and alone and not coping. Every day is a huge struggle. I am so sorry for this outpouring of grief. Really need help and don’t know where to find it. Am so terribly scared, feel like am going out of my mind, just can’t hold it together any more.
Hope you can point me in the right direction. Really NEED ‘one to one’ or group therapy urgently.
Thank you soooo much for taking the time and care to read this. I appreciate this so very much.
Chris