This book is about the ways in which the body “remembers,” at a cellular level, not only those secrets we may be keeping from others, but those we are keeping from ourselves. Our bodies not only remember, but often “speak up” about our truths in the form of isolated symptoms (back or jaw tension), or of certain disorders (depression, alcoholism), or of repetitively self-destructive modes of being in intimate relationships. Only very recently—due to astonishing advances in brain research and the study of human memory systems—has it become possible to begin listening to what the body has to tell us, and to use what we’ve been learning therapeutically.

I came to this particular subject very naturally, for 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, 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 arousal and hypervigilance had anything to do with trauma. (The body’s other mode of dealing with events that are experienced as overwhelming is shutting down, distancing, “spacing out”). I’d always viewed my sense of physical high alert, of unceasing wariness, as something that was simply “me”—part of the way that 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 her life, even very long ago—linked, that is, to events that had once felt overwhelming and to their often disturbing, long-abiding aftereffects.

Secrets, Lies, Betrayals is, I should say, not a memoir. It is instead a long discussion of the trauma that can be part of everyday living (as opposed to more obviously traumatic events such as wartime experiences, murder, rape and the like). The book is about ordinary people like Claudia, a lovely, successful woman who repetitively finds herself in explosive, tense relationships in which she has to lie about herself. It is about Karen, who feels physically ill when she sees the name of one of her husband’s female colleagues listed in his cell phone directory. It is about Beverly, who prides herself on her efficiency, and yet finds herself strangely incapable of changing the locks on the doors of the suite of offices she oversees when asked to complete this routine task.

In brief, Secrets, Lies is about the ways in which the body, through its neurobiological systems, retains some of our lives’ most important experiences - and it is also about the newly developed “power therapies” (for example, EMDR and psychomotor). In this book, the modern body-based therapies (one of which affected this author greatly) are described clearly, and in great detail. It is now recognized that there are numerous instances in which these unconventional treatments can sometimes produce immediate, almost magical results, where the more traditional “talking” therapies have proven ineffective.