Book Review: Welcome Home by Najwa Debian

What does it mean to be “healed?” What does it mean to have self-worth? What does it look like to believe in yourself? What does showing up for yourself and giving yourself self-love entail?

In her new book, Welcome Home, poet Najwa Zebian, wrestles with the idea of building a home within yourself, and offers the notion that for us to build self-love, we must first find peace and safety in ourselves without needing external validation or love from others to be deemed worthy. 

So often, as a clinician working with a wide range of clients from age 6 to age 65, I see the fundamental issue of self-worth being at the core of various symptoms, diagnosis, and issues clients come into therapy with. I often use multiple modalities of therapy to understand where my client is coming from, what stories have they adopted from their families, friends, and society at large and start to craft a picture of all the experiences the client has been through that lead them to my office.

I believe, fundamentally, all of the clients who walk through my door, and are greeted with compassion and tenderness, have the knowledge and strength to find themselves on the other side of the hardships they are going through. But in order to get there, they will need to build the trust and safety within themselves that I have seen in them all along. 

WELCOME HOME: A GUIDE TO BUILDING A HOME FOR YOUR SOUL

In the book, Welcome Home, Zebian walks the reader through a step-by-step guide on how to build a home within yourself, which means that the reader will begin to trust themselves, learn boundaries, learn self compassion, and realize that their worth was never in anyone else all along, but always within their inherent power of being their authentic selves.

In a beautiful entry at the start of the book, Zebian writes about the idea of building a protective home in yourself:

“The biggest mistake we make is that we build our homes in other people. We build those homes and we decorate them with the love and care and respect that makes us feel safe at the end of the day. We invest in other people, and we evaluate our self-worth based on how much those homes welcome us. But what many don’t realize is that when you build your home in other people, you give them the power to make you homeless. When those people walk away, those homes walk with them, and all of a sudden, we feel empty because everything that we had within us, we put into them. We trusted someone else with pieces of us. The emptiness we feel doesn’t mean we have nothing to give, or that we have nothing within us. It’s just that we. built our home in the wrong place.” 

When clients come to me and ask how they can move from looking for validation from their friends, partners, and jobs to trusting themselves on what choices are best for them or how they want their life to look, it begins with the small choices everyday to ask yourself the question first before looking to someone else to answer it for you. This can be extremely challenging, especially when we bring in diagnoses and symptoms revolving around anxiety, because many clients feel anxiety when they have to tackle big life changes on their own. I always remind my clients that we don’t have to change overnight.

Therapy is a process.

I even have to remind myself, as a clinician, that when big feelings of anxiety, depression, and hopelessness come in, these patterns and stories have typically been around for awhile, meaning to get to the root of these symptoms, it takes time to peel the layers of protection built around client’s symptoms that have been put in place to keep them safe at an earlier point in their life. 

I trust in my clients that at one point, their fear or panic or sadness was too big to handle, and they built up a defense mechanism that kept them safe. When they come in months or years later, they wonder why they have symptoms that fit clinical diagnosis. To me, it makes a lot of sense.

At one point, they were not taught the tools and ways of thinking that allowed them to build the metaphorical house in themselves, where they know fundamentally they are good enough at their core. Somewhere along they received messages from some external source that they have to be different in order to be worthy. This could be an issue around looks, intellect, material possessions, status in life, etc. These messages may have caused the client to then believe that in order to be whatever the ideal that they have built in their head is, they must make themselves smaller to fit into this mold.

Using the lessons and material in Zebian’s book Welcome Home, you can begin to rewrite you stories about who you are, what you learned along the way, and how to begin to realize that no one else can deem you worthy. But it starts by saying to yourself every day that you are enough and you have the resilience to learn how to trust in yourself, even if you weren’t taught how to. 

I wouldn’t be in this career if I hadn’t at one point felt so overwhelmed and hopeless with the way my life was going, that I sought out help through therapy to understand how to get everything under control.

What I didn’t know before going through the process was that I would actually learn how to answer those questions myself.

My therapist was there to guide me back to myself. I thought that therapy was a tool to answer my questions and fix my problems, but what I have learned is that it really is a safe and contained environment for me to learn how to build the resources within myself to answer those questions internally.

---------------

Click here to check out Najwa Debian's book, Welcome Home.

(not sponsored)

And click here to inquire about booking an intake session with one of our trained therapists!