Licensed Professional Counselor and author Kimberly Gregory traces decades of family addiction, childhood trauma, devastating loss, and resilience while sharing hard-earned lessons about boundaries, recovery, faith, and loving someone through addiction.
Kimberly Gregory has spent much of her life surrounded by addiction without becoming addicted herself. In Through Her Eyes, she opens the door to that experience, taking readers across more than six decades of memories and examining what it means to survive not only the disease of addiction, but also the damage it can inflict on the people who love those caught within it.
Organized chronologically from the 1960s through the 2020s, the memoir follows Gregory from a childhood marked by instability, neglect, abuse, family dysfunction, and substance use into adulthood, motherhood, education, counseling, and a career devoted to helping others. At the center of the book is a difficult contradiction: although addiction never claimed Gregory personally, it remained a constant presence throughout her life and repeatedly affected the people closest to her.
That reality became most painful through her daughter Natalie. Gregory recounts the long struggle of loving a child battling addiction, the repeated attempts to intervene and help, and ultimately the loss of Natalie and her unborn son. Gregory explains that returning to the manuscript after her daughter’s death changed the purpose of the book. What had begun as an account of survival became, for her, a way to honor Natalie while sharing what she had learned with families facing similar circumstances.
Rather than presenting herself as someone with every answer, Gregory writes as a mother, survivor, counselor, and what she calls a “navigator” who learned many of the most important lessons only after living through them. Her reflections eventually turn toward the practical questions families affected by addiction often face: When should love become a boundary? When does helping become enabling? How can someone remain compassionate while still saying no? And how does a caregiver continue functioning when the person who usually helps others is the one who is grieving?
The Duck’s Feathers: Navigating Generational Trauma & Setting Boundaries
Gregory’s experiences provide the foundation for this presentation on family patterns, trauma, and the difficult work of establishing healthy boundaries without withdrawing love. In Through Her Eyes, she describes reaching a point where she could no longer allow drug use into her home, particularly because it returned her emotionally to the addiction and fear she had experienced in childhood. She later identifies healthy boundaries, purposeful refusal, firmness, and avoiding enabling as lessons she wishes she had understood earlier.
When the Healer Grieves: Turning Therapeutic Tools Inward After Catastrophic Loss
Gregory’s professional life as a counselor eventually collided directly with her private struggle as a mother. On the first day of her first school-counseling position, she learned that Natalie had overdosed. At almost the same moment, she was called upon professionally to support students and staff dealing with an apparent student suicide. The experience captures one of the memoir’s central tensions: how a person trained to guide others through crisis continues functioning when crisis enters her own life.
That tension deepened after Natalie’s death, as Gregory had to apply lessons about presence, grief, coping, faith, and survival to herself and to the family members mourning beside her.
The Family Survival Guide: A Clinician’s Blueprint for Loving Someone Through the Addiction Crisis
The closing sections of Through Her Eyes turn Gregory’s lived experience into a series of lessons for families navigating addiction. She emphasizes learning about the disease, finding resources early, building a support network, communicating honestly, establishing boundaries, refusing to enable destructive behavior, protecting other family members, and recognizing recovery as an ongoing process rather than a single moment of success.
These lessons are not offered from clinical experience alone. They come from the intersection of Gregory’s professional training and the deeply personal reality of being a mother who spent years trying to save someone she loved.
About the Author
Kimberly Gregory is the author of Through Her Eyes and a Licensed Professional Counselor in private practice. She has earned two master’s degrees, including one in Mental Health Counseling, and has worked professionally as a teacher and school counselor before moving into private practice. She describes herself not simply through her credentials, but as a survivor and navigator whose personal experiences with trauma, addiction, motherhood, grief, and faith have shaped both her work and her desire to help others.
For readers who have loved someone through addiction, struggled to establish boundaries, carried the effects of childhood trauma, or faced a loss that changed the direction of their lives, Through Her Eyes offers a deeply personal account of what it means to keep moving forward. Faith remains central to Gregory’s understanding of that journey, and by the book’s conclusion she encourages readers to seek support, share what they have learned, and use their own experiences to help someone else survive.
Through Her Eyes is published by Red Rock Publishers.
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