BEING BROKEN is a wrenching, hugely affecting memoir. It begins with author Geoffrey R. Jonas’s frank admission of his own behaviors: he describes himself as formerly being “a liar, a manipulator, a thief, an emotional abuser, a bully, a misogynist, a cheater, homophobic, and potentially racist”—products of an upbringing in small-town Canada during which such behaviors were on show and seemed normal. But they’re also products of profound neglect during childhood that led to years of battling alcoholism and CPTSD. Similar exposures to adverse childhood experiences led his sister to drug use and a fatal overdose in 2022.
Jonas takes as objective an approach as he can. His mother suffered the loss of her own mother when she was young and was neglected during early life by an alcoholic father; she in turn neglected Jonas and his sister, while his father emotionally detached from Jonas and abandoned the family early in Jonas’s childhood. Family gatherings on his mother’s side were awash with drink, while unspoken traumas seemed to linger on his father’s side (with Jonas unable to probe further due to his father’s dementia). Jonas’s stepfather bullied him, the “scapegoat child,” sometimes physically, while his sister could (in his words) do no wrong. Jonas reacted by “grey rocking,” as it is now called, and withstanding the frequently bizarre punishments that came his way. Bouncing between households—his father worked for a time in Indonesia, and Jonas lived there intermittently during the early 1990s—it is chastening to read his account of how he lived, emotionally dysregulated by the emotional abuse heaped upon him.
Jonas is alert to the immense challenges caused by generational trauma. The book’s subtitle, “Tales and Essays of Survival and Death from Narcissistic Parental Abuse,” gives a sense of the work’s structure. Jonas proceeds carefully, breaking off regularly to offer examinations of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), issues of responsibility and blame in relation to family dynamics, and the like. His own misbehaviors in teenagerhood—stealing, drug use, bullying other kids in school—he describes as being akin to what he calls “rivers in the mind”: “Water always finds the path of least resistance.” In other words, he did what he did to get the next dopamine hit associated with the deed: a tendency that would increase in the following years. The chapters dealing with the death of his younger sister (who spiraled into body dysmorphia, self-harm, addiction, and PTSD) are almost unbearable.
From that perspective, BEING BROKEN is a testament. A key motivator-driver for Jonas is that he survived, while his sister did not, and his call for integrated mental health services (as well as early education on mental health issues) is timely. But Jonas’s own journey deserves notice, too; his growth as an individual, his determination to play the hand he was dealt, and his optimism are causes for celebration.
Though at times a difficult read, Geoffrey R. Jonas’s BEING BROKEN: Tales and Essays of Survival and Death from Narcissistic Parental Abuse offers profound and intensely affecting insights into familial abuse, the psychology of addiction, and the possibility of post-traumatic growth.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader