New from GraceRoot Institute
Leaving the Walls We Build Around the People We Love
A trauma-informed, Christ-centered approach to consequences, repentance, and relational repair
The premise
Nineveh’s problem was never that it was cruel. Its problem was that the walls had worked for so long that nobody inside could imagine needing anything.
Families do this. So do churches. And it almost always begins as love.
A mother covers a shortfall. A board protects a man who has given them twenty years. A daughter works out at nine years old that the most useful thing she can offer this family is to need nothing at all.
Nobody sets out to build a wall. But protection repeated long enough stops protecting the person and starts protecting the problem — and the people holding the weight are always the last ones able to see it.
How a wall gets built
Every course is laid by someone doing what looked, at the time, like the loving thing. These are the stones the book takes apart.
Five courses. Twenty-six centuries. One pattern.
Inside the book
Dr. Quinones traces how a household becomes organized around making sure one person never has to meet the truth about themselves — drawing on Scripture, two decades of clinical practice, and research she is unusually careful to report honestly.
From the excavated city
Nineveh is not a metaphor the book borrowed. It is a real city that was really buried, and what came out of the ground keeps describing the family in the room.
Find I
When the omens turned, the throne was handed to a stand-in. The danger was real. The point was that it should land on someone else.
Substitute king ritual
Find II
Sealed, filed, buried, and read for the first time by people who were not its intended audience. Some things do not stop being true because no one read them.
Library of Ashurbanipal
Find III
A banquet relief, a wife, a lyre, a vine — and a defeated king’s head hanging in the branches, in full view, while everyone carries on eating.
North Palace, Room S
Who it is for
If you have spent years covering for someone you love, this book does not begin by calling you the villain. There is no villain in it. It is for the mother, the spouse, the elder, the sibling and the grown child who kept the roof up — and for the pastor or board that has to decide what happens next.
You can be loved and still be wrong.
Epigraph
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Six exercises that take the seven movements out of the book and into your own house — a wall inventory, the boulders-and-backpacks sort from Galatians 6, and a builder for one limit that does not read as an ending.
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About the author
is the founder and CEO of GraceRoot Institute and Dareu2bu Counseling Services, organizations dedicated to empowering individuals through psychoeducational resources, mental health advocacy, personal and professional development, and transformational healing. With more than 20 years of experience in mental, emotional, and spiritual health through research, training, counseling, and ministry, Dr. Quinones has devoted her career to helping individuals discover their authentic identity, establish healthy boundaries, and achieve lasting personal growth.
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