Secrets, Lies, Betrayals - by Maggie Scarf (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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.

About the Author

MAGGIE SCARF, the author of three highly acclaimed bestsellers-- Unfinished Business, Intimate Partners, and Intimate Worlds--is a senior fellow at the Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University and a member of the advisory board of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale. She is currently a contributing editor to The New Republic and has served on the Oxygen/Markle Pulse Advisory Board; she also served as a member of the advisory board of the American Psychiatric Press for a decade (1990-2000). She has been a Ford Foundation fellow, a Nieman fellow in journalism at Harvard University, an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, has twice been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and is a grantee of the Smith Richardson Foundation, Inc. She has received several National Media awards from the American Psychological Foundation. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and is the mother of three daughters.