Kristin Hammoud’s important book, What is Wrong with Me? (Koehler Books), imparts therapeutic knowledge through the emotional journey of the protagonist, Anna.
Now trying to find her way in the world, Anna’s childhood experiences and dysfunctional family patterns darken her path to functional adulthood: her relationships suffer, and she can’t seem to trust the ones that might actually be good. Eventually, she ends up in an abusive relationship while family secrets unfold in volatile, unpredictable ways.
Trapped in a vicious cycle of emotional triggers and reliving her past, she constantly finds herself asking the universe what her real issue is.
She learns, however, some healthier coping skills and more useful behaviors, but not without bumps in the road. This is a fictional tale with a self-help twist; follow Anna as she hopes to answer one of life’s many questions that readers (or people they know) have undoubtedly asked themselves.
We’re proud to offer a Q&A with author Kristin Hammoud to get to know her, and her book, even more.
Q: Why did you write the book?
A: On my long journey of my passion to help others, I have continued to learn. People learn in many ways, and I wrote this novel to attempt to engage others to look at themselves through Anna. We can all work on our emotional health and I wanted to impart the things that are effective in my therapy to anyone open to reading it.
I wanted to generate emotions and an understanding of how our experiences cause adaptations and perceptions and play out throughout our lives in many ways. Anna’s childhood and learned behaviors play out in her life with emotional triggers as she uses harmful behaviors that keep her stuck. Through Anna, the reader can gain self-awareness and self-management tools to help them improve their confidence, relationships and empathy.
Q: Tell us about your profession as a psychiatric clinical nurse, the kinds of cases you see and how you help people.
A: I have worked in community mental health settings, the veteran’s partial hospital program and private practice. I work with people who are suffering with any mental health issues and have found that taking care of my emotional well-being allows me to be present and engaged in an understanding of the person I am with. I provide a safe therapeutic relationship to allow the person to gain knowledge about themselves and healthy tools to help their emotional health.
Q: Talk about the title, What is Wrong with Me? Why is this such a common question people at any age ask about themselves?
A: I have found many people ask this of themselves and I think this is a powerful and telling statement of where someone is in the present. We all repeat some patterns of behavior in our lives that when we reflect can figure out where we learned this behavior and how to mitigate it if it is unhealthy. We ask ourselves this question when we keep finding ourselves in a similar way and are stuck somehow reacting to triggers in our lives over and over again.
Q: What kind of therapeutic insights and psychological tools will Anna discover to help her through her struggles?
A: Anna learns about emotional intelligence and how she becomes more aware of her emotional triggers that evolved through her childhood and feeling unsafe. She learns she has repeated the patterns of her parents and normalized an abusive marriage and manages her emotions cognitively, and learns not to react by past muscle memory. She also learns through her daughter that she wants to stop the dysfunctional patterns she normalized from her adaptations in childhood and raise her daughter in a healthy environment she can feel safe in through her role-modeling and self-regulating.
Q: Do people like Anna often keep their feelings and experiences to themselves, and are they reluctant to share them? What do you do about that?
A: Yes. Some people with trauma or adverse childhood events adapt to keep themselves safe from harm. The closest people to Anna have hurt her, so she remains in a state of fight or flight and reacts to her triggers to prevent harm. Anna adapts by isolating and using drugs and alcohol to cope with her emotional state. It takes time for Anna to feel safe to let go of the adaptations that are hurting herself and her relationships in the present. As a therapist, I need to be seen as a safe person to allow the individual to trust and learn what happened to them and how they can find emotional well-being.
Q: Now technically, this book is a novel, with fictional characters. But each character is a stereotype, or composite, of real people you have worked with in your professional practice. Why did you decide to write the book in this manner?
A: There are many great self-help books out there and the research on brain health is growing. We all learn differently; reading a story means that one can relate to and gleam the insights and psychological tools of emotional intelligence and, through Anna, can see how to help oneself. Feeling Anna’s turmoil, watching her transitions, and seeing how she gains control over her emotional triggers and makes cognitive choices gives hope to everyone. Readers can reflect on what patterns they are repeating and how to become more self-aware to improve their emotional health and relate an important message.
Q: Is the book geared for a particular audience?
A: I geared this to everyone 18 and over, as it has grown-up content that can be difficult for a younger reader. It can help anyone to understand that how we process our life events can lead to a life of emotional dysregulation.
Q: What do you hope readers will take away from it?
A: I would like the readers to understand that taking care of one’s mental health can help lead to a happier and healthier life: thinking about mental health in a way we think of physical health to prevent illnesses and build self-confidence. When Anna is living a life being tense and reacting to her triggers, she keeps doing the same things and wondering what is wrong with her. Watching Anna identify her family patterns she learned from her own parents and what she normalized helped her to understand what happened to her. Once she identifies her problems and triggers, she learns ways of regulating her emotions and is then able to think about her response and make healthier choices for herself. Emotional intelligence gives way to health and happiness for everyone willing to learn. This can lead to societies that listen to each other and have empathy and compassion and kindness for each other.
Q: What is next for you?
A: I am writing my next novel as a parallel to Anna as a way to understand Dave and how his childhood had led him on his journey. The reader can understand how he evolved, and the moments when things shifted for him, and how he adapts into his perception of the world around him.
https://booktrib.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Kris-Hammoud-1-300×300.jpg
About Kris Hammoud:
Kris Hammoud is an author and psychiatric clinical nurse specialist in adult psychiatry. After graduating from Emory University with an MSN in Psychiatry and Family Practice, she has been treating patients with a wide range of psychiatric illnesses since 1999. She has worked for veterans affairs and in private practice and community health clinics, specializing in trauma, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, addiction, and other psychiatric illnesses. Sitting with hundreds of clients, each with a unique life journey, has culminated in her understanding of people’s ability to adapt and find resilience in the lived experience. She shares this knowledge and imparts therapeutic interventions into Anna’s journey of evolution in her book, What is Wrong with Me?
