"If you were going to tell or write the story of your life–which would, of course, begin when you were a small infant in your own family–what would the first sentence of your autobiography sound like?" Some years ago, while I was doing research for a book about families (Intimate Worlds), I routinely posed this question to every member of a family I was interviewing–anyone who seemed old enough and willing to try to answer it.

I would watch as people struggled to formulate their replies–many of which were weird, extraordinary, completely surprising. But nobody ever challenged me to respond in kind, to reveal what my own answer to that question might be. Nevertheless, it always popped into awareness, stood out so clearly against the background of my mind's horizon: "I was born, and nobody noticed."

But how could this possibly be an elemental truth of my life, the actual starting point of my own autobiography, when I remembered my mother as the most caring, gentle, generous of persons? This was a question I always seemed to sidestep, never confront head-on. It was so much at variance with my vivid memories of my mother, with that sense of loving and being loved that–whatever else was happening in the desperate household in which I grew up–I'd always believed had filled up my psychic fuel tank for a lifetime.

Even in the middle of my life, when I was married, a mother, and long gone from my original family, I kept encountering "hard evidence" of my mother's caring and her love for me. For instance, once, while gathering material for a New York Times article on sleep disorders, I learned how to self-induce body muscle relaxation with the aid of a biofeedback device. What this device was used for was "feeding back" to the sleep patient ongoing information about the state of his or her own muscular tension. Nothing, I soon found, could slow the sounds so effectively as imagining myself as a small infant, lying on a table, kicking my legs, "talking" to my mother, and laughing.

Beforehand, I'd been ushered into a soundproof room, asked to lie down upon a comfortable sofa with a set of earphones over my ears and electrodes pasted on the mobile, reactive muscles of my forehead; this enabled me to "hear" my facial musculature clenching each time I thought about something that made me feel taut and anxious. The biofeedback mechanism translated the electrical charge of the muscles into sounds: What I heard first was a rapid barrage of click-click-clicks.

It didn't take me long to discover that certain kinds of thoughts evoked an avalanche of sounds. Thinking about how to write the sleep article for the Times, for instance, evoked an auditory bombardment. But other thoughts tended to slow down the barrage of noises. When I set myself to focusing upon those thoughts, I was rewarded by hearing a widely spaced click… clic… click… click. The image of my mother, whenever I brought it into sharp focus–complete with the image of her smiling and leaning over me–actually brought about extended periods of time during which I heard no clicks at all. How could this powerful, revealing experience compute with that recurring first sentence of my life's narrative: "I was born, and nobody noticed"? If this message, so discordant with anything I consciously believed about my past, was coming to me from within my body, a part of me didn't really want to decode it.

This book is about the ways in which the body remembers, and may be expressing symptomatically, not only those secrets we may be keeping from others, but those we are keeping from ourselves. For in the course of my studies I was to confront the shocking realization that my deep love for my mother was the motivation for my "stuffing down" certain hurtful thoughts and memories of her that I couldn't bear to acknowledge consciously. Nevertheless, what my body knew was being expressed via a bodily symptom–that of tension in my jaw, which would tingle painfully at times or grow rigid, even frozen.

One morning–had I had a nightmare?–I'd even woken up and found my jaw so locked that I had trouble opening my mouth to brush my teeth. But until I became involved in the research for this book, it hadn't ever occurred to me that there might be some link between this occasional mysterious symptom–tension in the jaw–and lingering memories, stored in my body, of certain distressing life experiences.

Ultimately, this book is about the secrets and lies we may tell to others, or to ourselves, about the actual truths of our lives–about those painful or shameful or wounding experiences of the past or the present that we may strive to ignore or may simply forget, but which our bodies hold and remember. Our bodies not only remember, but frequently "speak up" about these truths in the form of isolated symptoms (back or jaw tension), or of certain disorders (depression, alcoholism), or of repetitively problematic patterns of positioning ourselves in our most intimate relationships. However, it is only recently–due to astonishing advances in brain research and the study of human memory systems–that we have been learning how to listen to what the body has to tell us and to use what we are learning therapeutically.

It is now widely recognized that the body stores memories of intensely stressful experiences, particularly in certain regions at the core of the brain (the limbic system, which is the seat of our emotions). We may not care to speak of these events to anyone, but memories of them–whether vividly recalled or lost to awareness–color many aspects of our daily existence, often without our conscious realization.

The Body's Reactions to High Stress: Hyperarousal and Numbing Out

As the daughter of a messianic, irrational father–a man who was prone to unpredictable, inexplicable rages–I grew up with a sense that anything could happen at any moment. Everyone in the household, including my docile mother, was afraid of my father–and we children knew that she was powerless to protect us from him. Growing up, as I did, in an atmosphere of unknown but palpable dangers had instilled in me an ingrained sense of readiness to meet a threat–a threat that could come from anywhere, at any time, without explanation.

However, it was only in the course of working on this book that I came to learn that this state of bodily hyperarousal and hypervigilance is one of the two major reactions to events that are experienced as overwhelming.

The body's other mode of responding is the diametrically opposite one–it is shutting down, distancing emotionally, feeling numb, "spacing out."

These two bodily reactions have a very different outward appearance, but internally, similar things are happening. In both instances, the body's "emergency alarm system" has been switched on and an instantaneous physiological readiness to meet the threat has come into play: the well-known "fight or flight" (or "freeze" if there's no way out) response.

This lightning-swift neurobiological reaction to situations of danger, which involves an elaborate, integrated set of bodily and psychological changes, is actually a survival mechanism–one that has served our species well over time and which we share with all other mammals. The downside, however, is that a complex, highly developed memory network enables us to keep certain experiences alive within us. A person's body may, therefore, remain in a state of high arousal and preparedness to meet a threat long after the danger itself is in the past. The body "remembers" what once happened–and at times neutral, even benign, occurrences can trigger similar kinds of biologically based, internal alarms.

In any case, as my intensive reading and my interviews with secret holders and with a host of varying experts proceeded, I came to the realization that I was not only discerning a picture emerging from the research for this book; I myself was a part of the picture that was emerging. Before this time, I'd never taken special note of the pervasive feelings of wariness, of worried expectation, that were held by me within my body–never thought these might be an expression of unresolved, unintegrated memories that were held within my nervous circuitry but not within my conscious thought processes.

Quite the contrary: I'd always viewed my sense of physical high alert, of vigilance, as something that was simply "me"–simply who I was, a part of the way I was constructed. I'd never even considered the odd notion that how a person's body felt inside at the present moment might be integrally linked to the things that had happened in his or her life, even long ago–linked, that is, to events that had once felt overwhelming and to their often disturbing, long-abiding aftereffects.

Secrets, Lies, Betrayals

At a more superficial level, the question of what first kindled my interest in the powerful, often subterranean effects of secrets, lies, and betrayals is an easy one to answer. At the twenty-ninth annual conference of the New York Society for Clinical Social Work, where I was the designated honoree, I attended a series of talks on the topic Secrets and Lies: Intrapsychic and Interpersonal Dimensions, and the repercussions of this conference were to remain with me for months and then for years to come. For that day's events seemed to affect me like a tuning fork, whose vibrations began resonating with a hitherto silent part of my internal world.

During the afternoon sessions, I heard presentations with such titles as "Living Everyday Lies," "Sex, Lies, and Infidelity," "Seeing Is Not Believing," and "Transgenerational Family Secrets"–and the sessions didn't disappoint. The more I listened to these narratives of marital affairs, wife battering, traumatic bonding, unspoken family shame, hidden food-related maladies, verbal/emotional abuse, and alcohol and drug disorders, the more fascinated I became; and I decided to undertake some further study of the subject of secrets and lies on my own. And, as the work progressed, I came to appreciate how closely related to bodily symptoms and repetitive problems with relationships (to spouses, lovers, colleagues, friends) these subjects actually were.

I had thought that the idea of talking about secrets and lies would make it hard to find a list of people who would be willing to be interviewed for the project, but I could not have been more mistaken: Volunteers came to me from a number of sources, including audiences at lectures I was giving at the time. It didn't take long–a mere matter of months–before I'd amassed a freightload of highly privileged secrets and confidential, personal data. And at the same time, quite unexpectedly, I'd found that a strong, even inexorable current was carrying me toward the fascinating research on traumatic experience and the lingering effects that certain long-past events could exert upon the body, the brain, and ongoing behavior in the present.

In retrospect, the reason I became so captivated by this work seems to me both logical and obvious. For what could be more secret, more mortifying and shame-ridden, than those painful, sometimes overwhelming remembrances of the past that most of us don't want to examine candidly, even think about, much less reveal to other people? In any event, what the trauma literature–and the research on the brain and on human memory systems as well–was telling me was that the body has a way of remembering those things that we may most wish to forget.

Shame-Related Secrets

Not surprisingly, in the course of the interviews, I found myself encountering a dizzying variety of secrets; I also discerned in people a broad range of motivations for keeping the information under lock and seal. But some motivations for secret keeping did, I noticed, recur with great frequency, and for that reason they stood out from all the rest.

One virtually omnipresent reason was shame–about those aspects of a person's early or present-day life that had to be disclaimed and disavowed. A parent's mental illness or alcoholism, or the fact that a family member had gone to prison, or the existence of emotional maltreatment or physical violence in the family of origin, might be the matter that had to be hidden. In other cases, the confidential narrative I was hearing had to do with neglect or the terrible invalidation that a person had experienced as a child–people are often deeply ashamed of having been victimized. On yet other occasions the secret had to do with worse cruelties, such as interpersonal abuse that was ongoing at the time of the interviews but being kept under wraps in order to keep up a presentable social facade. These abusive relationships often bore an uncanny resemblance to "familiar" situations–situations that one or both partners had encountered in their family of origin.

Another conspicuous motivation for keeping secrets was fear–and the most frequently encountered fears were those revolving around the threat of rejection and abandonment. Here, the individual's deepest certainty was that if the real truth about him or her were known–about an abortion, a period of promiscuity, a drug habit, the kind of family he or she came from–the secret holder would be revealed as unworthy or contemptible, someone whose past history or behavior was so unsavory that he or she deserved to be cast off, deserted.

For example, a deep-seated fear that her new bridegroom would leave the relationship precipitously if he ever learned the full truth about her past was the rationale for Claudia Martinelli's ongoing lies and deceptions about her past. So, too, were a poisonous admixture of shame, guilt, and a deep belief in her own badness that had been with her since earliest childhood. Such ingrained beliefs were reflected in her body, which was in a state of constant, tense hyperarousal.

Claudia Martinelli, whose story is woven throughout part 1, seemed to be responding to a blaring internal alarm that was sounding off within her, one that made a state of calm and relaxation impossible. This clamorous alarm–a "fight or flight" response that kept her body on continual high alert–was actually drowning out the more subtle communiqués that our bodies send to us on a routine basis. For this reason, Claudia couldn't hear the less strident warning signals from within that our bodies routinely dispatch to us and that might have guided her behavior–messages such as "Something doesn't feel quite right here," or "There's a problem," or "Can I trust this person to be on my side?"

Claudia's story is at once her own–unique–and also illustrative of many of the other life narratives that I heard in the course of my interviews for this book. Her state of high arousal and mistrustful vigilance, which kept her anxiously patrolling the outer walls of her world–fully expecting an attack from without–led to an incapacity to be fully present inside her body and therefore able to be responsive to the important messages being beamed to her from within. This deafness to the body's internal stream of informational signals is a well-recognized, often long-lived aftereffect of disturbing events that were once experienced as overwhelming.

At the level of conscious awareness, Claudia Martinelli was out of touch with her body. And because she had never been able to integrate what was happening inside her body with what was going on in her mind, she had no understanding of why she was doing the things she was doing. Instead, she seemed to be drawn toward continually reenacting and reexperiencing, in her life, the familiar distressing feelings. These bodily feelings and sensations were her baseline, her accustomed way of being.

People with a history like Claudia's–which is to say, those who have been witness to, or the target of, early trauma such as emotional neglect or abuse or physical violence–have a tendency to become involved in restaging strangely similar events in later adulthood. By getting into the same or a very similar situation, they return to a world with which they are familiar, one that feels consonant with what is happening inside their bodies–with the high arousal, shame, and fear they're experiencing. So Claudia's love choices kept re-creating, in the present, the secrecy, lies, hypocrisy, and abuse that she'd witnessed in her own original family. (See chapter 5, "Behavioral Reenactments: Was Claudia Martinelli in an Emotionally Abusive Relationship? What Is an Emotionally Abusive Relationship?")

Copyright © 2004 by Maggie Scarf