In his unflinch­ing­ly hon­est mem­oir, Mitchell Raff can­did­ly recounts his jour­ney to over­come gen­er­a­tional trau­ma and break free from decades of addic­tion. With raw vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, he lays bare his destruc­tive cop­ing mech­a­nisms and the far- reach­ing con­se­quences they wrought on his life and on those around him.

Beat­en mer­ci­less­ly as a child by his Holo­caust- sur­vivor moth­er, Mitchell was lat­er kid­napped from Los Ange­les to Israel before find­ing refuge with lov­ing rel­a­tives back in Amer­i­ca. In his adult life, the echoes of trau­ma forced Mitchell into pat­terns of sub­stance abuse, sex­u­al vices, and tox­ic rela­tion­ships. But at a cer­tain point, Mitchell explains, you need to own your deci­sions, for bet­ter or worse. After years of painful self- exam­i­na­tion and work, Mitchell set­tled into a healthy rela­tion­ship and found the strength to endure blows that once would have destroyed him. 

Mitchell’s unfil­tered account of his tri­als, fail­ures, and ulti­mate break­through to become the man he always want­ed to be is liv­ing proof that cycles of gen­er­a­tional trau­ma can be bro­ken, even the deep­est wounds can soft­en, and though the road is dif­fi­cult, it is with­in reach to not only sur­vive but thrive.