Often feelings of shame, powerlessness, and self-hate are bottled up with the memories, and as the memories come through, these feelings do, too. They think, If this happened to me when I was a child, what will they do to me when I’m actually a woman? Readers will feel recognized and encouraged by hundreds of moving first-person accounts drawn from interviews and the author's extensive work with survivors, both nationally and internationally. Most of the strategies discussed in this chapter have been used, at one time or another, by people struggling to come to terms with a wide range of challenging circumstances. Available in translations, as well as in an enhanced audio format, its life-saving messages resonate across cultural, linguistic, racial, religious, and geographical boundaries.

The Courage to Heal) - Goodreads Ellen Bass Quotes (Author of The Courage to Heal) - Goodreads

Now, I'm beyond that for the most part, but dealing with lingering self-esteem issues (to put it lightly), I'm finding it indispensable again. The possible role of source misattributions in the creation of false beliefs among preschoolers" (PDF). If a family member abused you, you might have been made the family scapegoat, repeatedly told that you were crazy or bad.

If, as a child you were left to fend for yourself or there were strings attached to getting what you needed, you learned that nurturing was either unavailable or unsafe. If the abuse took place outside your family and you weren’t adequately heard or responded to, you got the message that your pain wasn’t important, that you couldn’t rely on your family to listen to your feelings or protect you. I have been known to sit there and be totally gone and then to come back and have no idea where I am in a conversation. And even if the abuser didn’t say a word, the act of the abuse itself is a deep betrayal, seriously damaging your capacity to trust.

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The book is still dedicated to recovering memories, and does not warn the reader of the doubts scientists have about its premises. Some survivors avoid intimacy in less overt ways, seeming open and friendly on the surface but hiding real feelings inside. You may discover that some of the ways you’ve coped have developed into strengths (being successful at work, becoming self-sufficient, having a quick sense of humor, being adaptable, responding well in a crisis).Frederick Crews has criticized the book for appealing not to women who have always remembered abuse, but rather being aimed at those who struggle to convince themselves they were abused as children in the absence of previously existing memories, and that the authors' claim to promote self-esteem are actually based "on a shattering of their readers' prior sense of identity and trust". This capacity to forget explains why many adult survivors are unaware of the fact that they were abused or remember only parts of their experience. And their fallacious diagnostic reasoning—epitomized in one quoted Survivor’s rhetorical question, “Why would I be feeling all this anxiety if something didn’t happen?