Product 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #847901 in Books
• Released on: 2004-05-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Scarf, author of Unfinished Business (1980), explores how life traumas are imprinted on the body and relived through a variety of symptoms from headaches to muscle tension and from memory lapses to persistent latent anger. Through case studies, she focuses on people whose lives are dictated by past experiences they attempt to keep secret even from themselves, unable to break the pattern partly because the experiences are stored in their bodies. Among her case studies is Claudia, a woman who has repressed many of her painful memories and marries a man very similar to her emotionally abusive father. Interspersed with the case studies are Scarf's own personal revelations of a neglected childhood she is only beginning to acknowledge. Scarf cites neurobiological research showing that memories exist at a physical as well as a psychological level. She discusses new "power therapies," some of which she has tried herself, which are aimed at treating both the mind and the body, accessing parts of the body that are linked to emotions, releasing the body memories, and beginning the process of healing. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“Maggie Scarf is brilliant, a writer with foresight who has always been ahead of the pack, and she writes in language people can relate to. Her humanistic way of looking at life shines thru in this astonishing book about how the past resides in our bodies–and what we can to do about it.”
--Nancy Friday, author of My Secret Garden and Women on Top

“This is a book that puts body, mind and spirit together, and helps dispel the ghosts. Maggie provides a deep sense of hope with the idea that we might look at these early traumas in our lives and find a way to be healed of the fight-or-flight impulses that sometimes drive us away from the very things we want most in our lives–friendship, warmth, loving relationships with those nearest us, and, finally, the answers that were hidden by the scars that cover those secrets
present in most every one of us.”
--Judy Collins

"This book is a for-real treasure map. It leads us through a lot of pain and trauma to a secret, buried world of feeling locked inside the human body--and shows us the terrific reward possible at the end. With her characteristic compassion and erudition, Maggie Scarf is a superb guide to radically new approaches to healing trauma and betrayal. I have been a patient on the path Scarf follows here, and this is exciting, ground-breaking material, beautifully presented."
--Augustus Napier, author, The Family Crucible and The Fragile Bond

Maggie Scarf has given us a book with the force of revelation. Secrets, Lies, Betrayals shows how our bodies store the painful memories of our past. This is a book that will make you see yourself and your whole life in a new way.
–Susan Cheever, author of My Name is Bill

"The mix of theory and story is one of the things Maggie Scarf does so well.
I found the book compelling, convincing and, in a good way, shocking."
–Betty Rollin, author of First, You Cry and Last Wish

Here are the mind’s various activities, possibilities, given the corporeal home that nature has offered it–a searching, knowing exploration of how our thoughts, experiences, persist in our neuro-muscular life, assert themselves in how we live (with whom, under which circumstances, and with what instincts of mind and heart). Here is mind connected to body–and done so with the help of a documentary effort: the author herself, and others she has come to know, enable us, through their personal narratives, to understand human psychology, its pleasures and its darker side, as an aspect of the physical existence each of us has, experiences.
–Robert Coles, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities, Harvard Medical School

Maggie Scarf's thesis–that in painful circumstances the body has a mind of its own–is both enlightening and liberating in that if offers a way out. This is characteristic of her work. She is alert enough to spot a problem that no one else has seen, and generous enough to provide a remedy. That her writing is as clear as daylight is icing on the cake.
–Roger Rosenblatt

Maggie Scarf has an extraordinary gift for sharing with the reader her own intimate memories and thoughts, those of the person whose story she tells, while simultaneously discussing the neurobiology of memory, in readily understood terms. The intertwining of her narrative with those she skillfully interviews is captivating. She is insightful and incisive. Her picture of family trauma and violence reveals its pervasiveness and inaccessibility. This is truly a remarkable tour de force, a book that one cannot put down.
–Carol Nadelson, M.D.