"A fascinating and empowering text for women of all ages."
--Publishers Weekly



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Read an interview on the book in the May issue of O Magazine

About Joyce McFadden

Joyce McFadden is a certified psychoanalyst with an MSW from Columbia University and five years of postgraduate training. She’s a faculty member, training analyst and clinical supervisor at the Training and Research Institute for Self Psychology, and faculty member of Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, and the New York City Open Center. Author of the ongoing anonymous web-based Women’s Realities Study, and a featured blogger for Huffington Post, she’s been practicing for 25 years and has offices in Manhattan and East Hampton, NY.

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About My Work
After treating countless women who felt alone and isolated in experiences that they were unaware many other women were dealing with too, I began to ask what I could do to help them reach out to each other. The result was the launch of the Women’s Realities Study in which I interviewed hundreds of women from ages 18-105, about the most private issues as I sought to understand what events in a woman’s life impact her future happiness and self-confidence. What I found was truly revealing— the theme that most interested them as they explored their identities was how their relationship with their mothers influenced their understanding of themselves as sexual beings throughout their lives.

In my study of 450 women, they reveal that when their mothers conveyed that sexuality was somehow bad, or when they left sexuality out of the dialogue while they were growing up, it set them up to feel alienated from themselves--from their feelings, their instincts and their bodies.  This, in turn, made them lose faith in their mothers' ability to be there for them in the ways they needed, which created distance in the mother- daughter relationship over their lives together.
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