Breaking the Silence, April 13, 2025

Breaking the Silence with host Dr. Gregory Williams Guest, Sally McQuillen, author of Reaching for Beautiful A Memoir of Loving and Losing a Wild Child This week's Special Guest will be Sally McQuillen. She is a psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in addiction recovery, grief and trauma healing. She earned a Master's Degree in Social Work. She is also the author her book: "Reaching for Beautiful: A Memoir of Loving and Losing a Wild Child" in which she tells about losing her 21-year-old son in a tragic boating accident. Joins as Sally tells us her inspiring and impactful story. Don't forget to check out Sally's book: "Reaching for Beautiful: A Memoir of Loving and Losing a Wild Child" Short description of "Reaching for Beautiful: A Memoir of Loving and Losing a Wild Child" from Amazon. A luminous story of how love triumphs over pain, love transcends fear and love never dies; this debut memoir from a mother grieving her young-adult son’s death is a must-read for any parent who has lost a child, is raising a child from the edge of their seat, or whose family struggles with addiction. When Sally’s twenty-one-year-old son died in a boat accident, her greatest fear is realized. Christopher was often drawn to risk and struggled with addiction. In this riveting memoir, Sally captures the wild ride of his jam-packed life and her deep love for him while reflecting on her own childhood and family’s legacy of alcoholism. Sally shares insights about what it’s like to experience the emotional aftershocks of acute grief, filtered through the lens of her personal experience as a mother and her professional vantage point as a psychotherapist. Even if they have not been touched by loss in this way, readers may see themselves in Sally’s bittersweet illusion of trying to keep her son safe, in how she is challenged to let go of her fear, guilt, and regret in order to forgive herself, and in the ways grief teaches her about the power of love.