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GraceRoot Relationship Healing Institute

Cover of Rolling Stones, Broken Bonds by Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC

Fatherhood & attachment

Rolling Stones, Broken Bonds

Paternal Absence, Relational Trauma, and the Generational Search for Repair

Some fathers leave. Some stay and never arrive. The wound does not end with him — but it can end with you.

Absent is not the only way to be gone

The book opens on a distinction most conversations about fatherhood never make: a father can be physically gone and psychologically everywhere, and a father can be in the house every night and never once arrive.

Ask around about a man like this and you will not get a monster.

That sentence opens the chapter on the archetype, and it sets the book's temperature. This is not a case for the prosecution. It is an attachment-based account of what actually transmits down a family line, written by a clinician who is more interested in where the pattern stops than in who to blame for starting it.

What the book works through

Every person in the book is a composite. The author's note says so on the first page, and treats that as more than legal cover — it explains what composites protect and what they cost.

Written for four readers at once

Adult children

For the person doing the arithmetic on what they did and did not get, and what to do with the answer.

Parents breaking the pattern

For the mother or father who can see the shape of it and intends to be where it stops.

Clinicians and pastoral caregivers

Trauma-informed and attachment-based, with the mechanism made explicit rather than assumed.

The fathers themselves

Included deliberately, and addressed without contempt — which is rarer in this literature than it should be.

The cycle ends in a generation that decides to feel it.

Written for adult children, for parents breaking the pattern, for clinicians and pastoral caregivers — and, without contempt, for the fathers themselves.

Program Clarity

GraceRoot courses are psychoeducational learning programs, not emergency care, legal advice, or a replacement for therapy. Certificates document GraceRoot completion. Court, employer, board, or continuing education acceptance should be confirmed before purchase unless a page states a specific approval.