Brainwashed

by Kashonia Carnegie

WINNER OF 10 INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARDSSOMETIMES WE JUST DON'T KNOW WHO OUR GREATEST ENEMY ISPsychological Domestic Abuse, experienced as a child, a teen, or an adult in an intimate relationship, can have life-long effects, including the making of disastrous decisions, and on to PTSD, unless it's understood and the victim/survivor is helped to summon the courage to do what it takes to heal. After thirty odd years of relentless searching, at the age of sixty-three, Kashonia finally discovered that her greatest enemy was her psychologically abusive childhood. Before that, she'd always thought she'd had a relatively good childhood. Why? Because she hadn't been physically or sexually abused as a child. But the subtle psychological abuse she received as a child through until she was twenty was what predisposed her to accept, as "normal", a very psychologically, and sometimes physically, abusive marriage. Yet, no matter who read about Kashonia's event-filled life, the only thing they recognized were the handful of physically violent experiences. They completely dismissed the far more insidious on-going psychological abuse. It was clear that the only way to help people understand society's monstrous, hidden epidemic of psychological abuse was to overtly explain it as she told her story. And this is what Kashonia has inspirationally done in Brainwashed. In Brainwashed, Kashonia's wry sense of humor occasionally appears as she uses forty years of Behavioral Science, Neuroscience, and Neurolinguistics research to overtly explain her extraordinary life of psychological abuse, its devastating PTSD aftermath, and why people stay in abusive relationships. Courageously, she shares the serendipitous source of her most significant transformation which gave her the strength to escape her abusive marriage. This was also the mostly unlikely source of her spiritual journey, which has kept her going through the really tough times ever since. Kashonia's story is true for more people than we realize. Sadly, all too often the victim/survivors of psychological abuse don't even realize they've been abused. So her story and her greatest enemy could well be your story and your greatest enemy too. Today, Kashonia is a Moral Philosopher with a PhD in the Ethics of Conscious Change and author of the Multi-Award-Winning Conscious Change Series of books. It was her life, as documented in Brainwashed that led her to research and write the Conscious Change Series. In 2023, with a growing concern about mental health and PTSD in non-combatants, Brainwashed is extremely timely for a number of reasons.

• Brainwashed will be of comfort to other victim/survivors of psychological abuse, in helping them understand at a deeper psychological level, why they do/did make the decisions that they did.
• It will also give those very lucky people, who've not endured what we victim/survivors have experienced, a greater appreciation of the complexities of psychological abuse, where the scars are all on the inside.
• Brainwashed also highlights the life-long psychological damage that negative childhood conditioning can have.
• It's a reminder to psychologists, that even if their client insists they've had a good childhood, it must still be explored.
• And with the growing community concern about mental health and the area of PTSD, Brainwashed will shed a vital light on what that can be like, and how Kashonia was able to heal.