Secrets, Lies, Betrayals: The Body/Mind Connection

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.

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.