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by Peggy Sharr (Author)
Surviving the Family Kingdom is a gripping page-turning memoir about growing up inside a highly controlling family cult system and the long, complicated journey of finding your way out.
As a child, Peggy was taught that obedience was love and fear was faith. Pulled from school, moved from town to town, and shaped by a mother who believed she was chosen by God, Peggy learned early how to disappear in order to survive.
This memoir traces Peggy's path from enforced loyalty and silence to self-trust, motherhood, and the fierce determination to protect her children from the legacy she escaped. With honesty and restraint, Surviving the Family Kingdom explores how control can masquerade as devotion, how fear shapes relationships, and what it takes to reclaim identity after growing up inside an emotional cage.
At its core, this is a story about survival, courage, and the slow, deliberate act of choosing who you will become.
Before her mother created what she would later call The Kingdom, Peggy and her sister were held captive for two years by a man who exerted absolute control over their lives. Those years left deep psychological wounds, not only in Peggy and her sister, but in their mother as well. Combined with a loveless childhood of her own, the trauma fractured something essential in her. What followed was not healing, but transformation.
In the aftermath, Peggy's mother built The Kingdom in search of belonging, safety, and purpose. Instead, she created a closed world ruled by fear. She presented herself as a modern-day messiah and warned of a Lake of Fire awaiting those who questioned or disobeyed her. What she sought was connection; what she received were devotees bound by terror, loyalty enforced through belief, and silence mistaken for faith.
In Surviving the Family Kingdom, Peggy Sharr tells the gripping true story of growing up inside this highly controlled, cult-like family system, and the long, nonlinear journey of getting out. Leaving The Kingdom meant navigating poverty, addiction, fractured relationships, and the invisible aftermath of psychological control. It meant learning to trust her own voice after years of submission and discovering that survival is only the beginning.
Told with raw honesty and forward momentum, Surviving the Family Kingdom is a page-turning memoir about:
- Growing up in a controlling, cult-like family system called The Kingdom
- How unresolved trauma can turn belief into domination
- Fear, devotion, and the cost of unquestioned authority
- The long shadow trauma casts after escape
- Reclaiming agency through education, love, and chosen family
This is not just a story about what was endured, but about what came after. About becoming a psychotherapist, breaking generational patterns, leaving an addicted marriage, and slowly building a life defined not by fear, but by choice.
Surviving the Family Kingdom is for anyone who has ever questioned loyalty, survived control, or wondered how a life is rebuilt after everything familiar falls away.
For readers of trauma memoirs, cult survival stories, and coming-of-age narratives, this book offers both intensity and insight. It is unflinching, deeply human, and impossible to put down.
