Tell Your Therapist About the Abuse

‘Unresolved emotional pain is the great contagion of our time — of all time.’ ~ Marc Ian Barasch Imagine you are seeing a therapist and have an abuse history. It’s safe to assume that you’ve already talked to the therapist about the abuse. Right? It would make sense, and yet, again and again I hear other abuse survivors say they’ve postponed talking to their therapist about the abuse. The phrase ‘child abuse’ becomes easily stuck in a victim’s throat. The abuser may distort the events that occurred so we aren’t sure of what happened. Sometimes, we’re so young when the abuse occurred we barely understand what was going on. Memory also plays tricks. In an attempt to insulate us from terrifying experiences, memory can become a block of Swiss cheese with holes in it everywhere. ‘I’m not sure what really happened,’ is a common sentiment. ‘I just have feelings.’ Others blame themselves or fail to trust their own memory, ‘maybe I was just a strange kid.’ I lived in denial that I was sexually

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