The Choice

to take me mentally into her father’s study, where the molestations
had occurred. is is an extremely vulnerable stage in the therapeutic
process, and there is an ongoing debate in the psychology and
neuroscience communities about how useful or harmful it is for a
patient to mentally relive a traumatic situation, or physically return to
a site of trauma. When I received my training, I learned to use
hypnosis in order to help survivors reexperience the traumatic event in
order to stop being hostage to it. In more recent years, studies have
shown that putting someone mentally back in a traumatic experience
can be dangerous—psychologically reliving a painful event can actually
retraumatize a survivor. For example, aer the September 11 attacks
on the World Trade Center, it was discovered that the more times
people saw the image of the towers going down on TV, the more
trauma they had years later. Repeated encounters with a past event
can reinforce rather than release the fearful and painful feelings. In my
practice and in my own experience, I have seen the effectiveness of
mentally reliving a traumatic episode, but it must be done with
absolute safety, and with a well-trained professional who can give the
patient control over how long and how deeply he or she stays in the
past. Even then, it isn’t the best practice for all patients or all therapists.
For Beatrice, it was essential to her healing. To free herself from her
trauma, she needed permission to feel what she hadn’t been allowed
to feel when the abuse was taking place, or in the three decades since.
Until she could experience those feelings, they would scream for her
attention, and the more she tried to suppress them, the more violently
they would beg to be acknowledged, and the more terrifying they
would be to confront. Over many weeks, I guided Beatrice gently,
slowly, to get closer to those feelings. Not to be swallowed by them. To
see they are just feelings.
As Beatrice had learned from doing the grief work, ĕnally allowing
herself to feel her immense sorrow had given her some relief from the