About the Book

From an African Beginning, a Journey to Clarity, is the story of Vicky Markham’s journey from her American family’s legacy in Africa, to finding both psychological and spiritual healing from complex trauma as an adult – trauma created by witnessing the beginning of two wars, being the only white student in an African high school during apartheid, and then having to acculturate to college in the US during the Vietnam war and the counterculture.

Vicky draws readers into the possibility of healing their own emotional issues, as she shares her search for self understanding and eventually, ways to heal her emotions.

Vicky had three quests in adult life: a life partner, meaningful work, and spiritual clarity. Her experiences in Africa moved her to become a psychologist in order to help people understand their differences. Her search for healing led her to become a meditation practitioner. 

Vicky shares her spiritual perspective, which included both meditation and mysticism, without implying that it is the only way. She discovers the unconscious emotional themes from her childhood as she moves through her adult life, and finds the keys to healing them.

She details the elements to her healing, both psychological and spiritual. The message she would like readers to understand is that it is normal to have emotional issues, and it is normal and necessary to make mistakes in order to learn. Healing these emotional issues is possible. She shares her own psychological framework on healing, using her own life as an example.

She uses her story to offer the reader one example of a difficult, vulnerable, and quietly victorious journey towards healing and spiritual understanding, in the hopes of encouraging others to find a path of their own.

.