Secrets, Lies, Betrayals
The Body/Mind Connection
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Reading Maggie Scarf’s groundbreaking new book could change your life. In Secrets, Lies, Betrayals, the bestselling author of Unfinished Business, Intimate Partners, and Intimate Worlds brilliantly explores how the body holds on to painful episodes from the past—including secrets we may be keeping even from ourselves—and how we can release them to live freer, healthier lives.
The body has a unique memory system, in which early trauma and deeply buried feelings become woven into the fabric of our physical being. Certain events can trigger these body memories, which may then manifest themselves symptomatically—as persistent anger, mood swings, headaches, muscle tension, and fatigue. These echoes from the past also cause destructive patterns in our lives and relationships.
Why does a beautiful, successful woman like Claudia seek out abusive, explosively tense relationships in which she is forced to hide the truth about herself? Why does the presence of a strange woman’s name in her husband’s cell phone directory make Karen feel physically ill, to the point where she cannot get through her daily life? And why does the author herself experience painful physical symptoms when she wrestles with contradictory memories of her mother? Exploring these and other personal narratives, Scarf reveals how the body, through its neurobiological systems, retains some of life’s most important experiences—and describes how new power therapies, such as reprocessing and psychomotor, have had immediate results where traditional therapies have had a lower success rate.
Grounded in recent breakthroughs in mind/body science and drawing on Scarf’s personal experiences, this book is a masterpiece of research, analysis, and insight into the human psyche, and into human life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestselling author Scarf (Intimate Partners; Unfinished Business) explores new therapies that claim to be able to "reprocess" or "detoxify" traumatic memories through physical manipulation of the nervous system. Via accessibly presented neuroscience, Scarf explains how the body stores memories of intensely stressful experiences. A writer rather than a clinician (she's a senior fellow at Yale's Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy), Scarf generates her data through meeting women subjects in marital distress and exploring their pasts through gentle discussion. Throughout, Scarf weaves her own autobiographical reflections, centered on painful memories of an autocratic father and a negligent mother. Seeking to advance her own emotional well-being, she enters into a reprocessing therapy session and becomes an advocate of the technique; she persuades one of her subjects to try it out, with apparently successful results. Although the physical ailments presented in Scarf's account seem extremely slight, she makes much of a sense of emotional breakthrough and release. Scarf's investigation into the methodology of reprocessing therapies is scientifically limited, yet she does allow us some insights into how they function. Admirers of her work will enjoy her ability to evoke relationship dynamics (including abusive relationships), her seductively flowing style and her emphasis on perceptive readings of life histories. Readers with a serious interest in psychology will find little cutting-edge scholarship here, and some may question why all Scarf's subjects are women.
