Book Review: From The Darkness - by John James



The only book on Domestic Violence you’ll need and especially of Male Victims of Domestic Abuse.



This is one book you will need and quite possibly, the only book, if you’re a domestic violence support worker, health care professional, police officer, social worker, work in the community or a counsellor and you want to learn more on Domestic violence from the horse’s mouth. Much more than any theoretical book that I would have studied as a counsellor on abuse or DV issues, or within my domestic violence work with women. If you need or want to raise your learning game, in seeing just how insidious abuse is, how the manipulation of one person over another and the use and abuse of that person can be so deftly hidden or outrightly and at times even, publicly visible, and how the degradation of a whole person through power constructs, the use of sex to manipulate and the drip, drip war of the psyche within emotional and psychological abuse can be, the subtleties of abuse and the breaking down, stripping-the-bone clean of one person by another can be and how decidedly frightening, no, horrifying it is, to live within such a relationship, then this will be your opportunity to become fully impassioned and championing this man’s freedom. We are willed on, page by page by the author’s determination to be free of abuse to walk alongside him, as if a fly on the wall, an invisible friend to help him overcome his PTSD, self harming, his relational being in and out of the abusive relationship and our ever thinking ways to help assist, offer our humanity and provide solutions to one human being to remain free from abuse. You will not put this book down until he is SAFE and FREE.



This is a fantastically written testament to survivorship and sharing of a domestic violence story in all its entirety. Nothing is prettied up for the reader and you are taken into a world that has only possibly been uttered to you through tissues and tears. This is a first-hand account, almost in real-time if any such thing can occur in a book. Be warned, the abuse John James receives is GRAPHIC and deeply painful. For Survivors of Domestic Violence and abuse, this will resonate hugely. It will very likely possibly trigger your own memories, story and experience, but you will also will and wish him free and affirm your own history and path to freedom. He is both emotionally bare and viable as narrator and victim, disempowered and empowered at each chapter and offers his heart and hope too for all men and women suffering domestic abuse and seeking freedom.