Why Does This Hit Me So Hard?

Explore the five emotional wounds and recurring relationship patterns. The book distinguishes Lise Bourbeau’s popular framework from Young’s schema therapy.

You sense, in a confused way, that you keep repeating the same painful patterns without understanding why? This book starts from the five soul wounds popularized by Lise Bourbeau — rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, injustice — and builds a bridge between her clinical intuition and the scientific advances of contemporary psychology, particularly the eighteen early maladaptive schemas identified by Jeffrey Young, each of the five wounds activating one or several of them. Ten chapters map this invisible legacy, explore each wound in detail, decode the five masks we develop to protect ourselves (the fleeing, the dependent, the masochistic, the controlling, the rigid), and show how these wounds intersect and mutually worsen each other within a relationship. The book is transparent about its sources: it clearly distinguishes Bourbeau's clinical intuition — she isn't a psychology researcher — from scientifically validated data. A structured healing path, from schema to freedom, to help you stop suffering your wounds and learn to live with them without letting them define your identity.