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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.
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.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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168 people want to read
About the author
Maggie Scarf
13 books9 followersMaggie Scarf is a former visiting fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, and a current fellow of Jonathan Edwards College, Yale University. She was for many years a Contributing Editor to The New Republic and a member of the advisory board of the American Psychiatric Press.
Maggie Scarf is the author of six books for adults, including the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Unfinished Business: Pressure Points in the Lives of Women and Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage. Her other books include: Body, Mind, Behavior (a collection of essays, most of them first published in The New York Times Magazine); Intimate Worlds: How Families Thrive and Why They Fail; Secrets, Lies, Betrayal: How the Body Holds the Secrets of a Life, and How to Unlock Them; and, most recently, September Songs: The Bonus Years of Marriage. She is also the author of two books for children. Her works have been published in British, Canadian, German, Hebrew, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and Swedish editions.
Ms. Scarf is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Ford Foundation Fellowship and a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard. She has received several National Media Awards from the American Psychological Foundation, including the first prize. During the recent past, Ms. Scarf has served on the National Commission on Women and Depression, has been the recipient of a Certificate of Appreciation from the Connecticut Psychological Association, and also received The Connecticut United Nations Award, which cited her as an Outstanding Connecticut Woman. In 1997, she was awarded a Special Certificate of Commendation from the American Psychiatric Association for an article on patient confidentiality (“Keeping Secrets”), which was published in The New York Times Magazine.
She has appeared on many television programs, including Oprah, Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS News, and CNN, and has been interviewed extensively on radio and for magazines and newspapers across the nation. She currently blogs for Psychology Today.
Maggie Scarf lives in Connecticut with her husband Herb, the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, and is the mother of three adult daughters.
Maggie Scarf is the author of six books for adults, including the acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Unfinished Business: Pressure Points in the Lives of Women and Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage. Her other books include: Body, Mind, Behavior (a collection of essays, most of them first published in The New York Times Magazine); Intimate Worlds: How Families Thrive and Why They Fail; Secrets, Lies, Betrayal: How the Body Holds the Secrets of a Life, and How to Unlock Them; and, most recently, September Songs: The Bonus Years of Marriage. She is also the author of two books for children. Her works have been published in British, Canadian, German, Hebrew, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and Swedish editions.
Ms. Scarf is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Ford Foundation Fellowship and a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard. She has received several National Media Awards from the American Psychological Foundation, including the first prize. During the recent past, Ms. Scarf has served on the National Commission on Women and Depression, has been the recipient of a Certificate of Appreciation from the Connecticut Psychological Association, and also received The Connecticut United Nations Award, which cited her as an Outstanding Connecticut Woman. In 1997, she was awarded a Special Certificate of Commendation from the American Psychiatric Association for an article on patient confidentiality (“Keeping Secrets”), which was published in The New York Times Magazine.
She has appeared on many television programs, including Oprah, Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS News, and CNN, and has been interviewed extensively on radio and for magazines and newspapers across the nation. She currently blogs for Psychology Today.
Maggie Scarf lives in Connecticut with her husband Herb, the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, and is the mother of three adult daughters.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 10, 2011
She talks about a revolution in psychotherapy which is questioning the limitations of 'talk' therapies. This recognition has led to the development of body-centered therapies such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor (PBSP),more simply, psychomotor therapy.
Traditional psychotherapy starts in the frontal lobe and is 'top down' in the sense that it relies upon language to effect change. However, when previous trauma (including small 't' traumas such as neglect, betrayals etc.) evokes physical responses, those biological events become lodged in the body even if we can arrive at a cognitive frame that resolves the issue. The body-centered therapies are more 'bottom up' and recognize the importance of the body in our emotions and, in turn, our emotions in our everyday experiences (See Damasio here). "The body keeps the score". (This ties in with the concept of allopathic load which has been associated with susceptibility to disease and illness).
"..a newly evolving definition of what is meant by a 'self'-one that isn't solely psychological in nature but includes the deeper, wordless levels of the brain and body's nervous circuitry-s in the process of emerging." (This is not a new concept as others have written of the body as the repository of the unconscious. What is new is the way in which some of the new neurosciences are corroborating this).
"..the body has a way of remembering those things we most wish to forget." This fits nicely with an observation of Alexander McLeod:"We are made most specifically by the things we cannot bear to do."
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) involves staring death in the face such as combat situations or violent personal assault. "Moreover the diagnosis requires that the person experiencing the trauma must have responded with 'intense fear, helplessness or horror..'" The author refers to this as big T trauma and argues that there are many episodes of 'little t trauma' leading to what she calls post-traumatic stress, often carried as bodily symptoms. These are not rare with one study stating that 60% of adult men and 51% of adult women experienced events that qualified as traumas. "We now know that there are many situations in which we are having powerful somatic reactions to experiences that may have long since slipped beneath the surface of awareness." She uses the interesting term 'physioneurosis' for the results of such events.
"Not only does the body remember, but the original story goes on being told and retold in disguised form-often as incomprehensibly powerful emotional and physical reactions or as inexplicable, self-damaging, repetitive patterns of behavior."
"...the primary underlying motive for secret keeping has to do with shame. Secrets are founded upon the belief that if certain aspects of your life and history were to see daylight, you would not be regarded as an acceptable human being; you would be seen, and see yourself, as outside the pale of decency, the shameful violator of some kind of taboo. When it comes to holding back or opening up, fears of spoiling other people's images of you or of disrupting important relationships are always being weighed in the balance against the heavy psychological and interpersonal burdens of living alone with the information."
"A number of research studies indicate that 'abused men and boys tend to identify with the aggressor and later victimize others whereas abused women are prone to become attached to abusive men and allow themselves and their offspring to be victimized further."
The new body therapies or power therapies use the body's memory of past events to gain access to regions deep within the emotional brain...the limbic system, where oversensitive networks of reacting have been established.
I found this book very useful as an update on thinking in these areas. I was a bit frustrated that in the rich clinical descriptions she uses all the individuals are women. Any men mentioned are simply abusive either emotionally or physically or unavailable emotionally (which she would define as emotional abuse). One of her cases involves a women who, in her eyes, had a very satisfactory marriage stating that she had a comfortable home, enjoyed her children etc. when her world came apart as her husband abruptly told her that she needed a lawyer as he wanted a divorce. She learned that he had extramarital affair. The book focuses on her response to this unexpected and devastating turn of events and we only learn later that her husband had been dealing with the death of his own father when this affair developed. This led me to wonder what role she saw for herself in helping her husband cope with an event that is well recognized as highly significant in any man's life...who was emotionally unavailable to whom? The book does not explore this at all.
A smaller quibble, though she uses the term 'felt experience' in the book, she does not refer to Eugene Gendlin, who, I believe, first used the term. In any case his work fits in with the concepts in the book and it seems strange that it is nowhere referred to.
Despite these issues, I think the book is worthwhile reading for anyone involved in counseling.
Traditional psychotherapy starts in the frontal lobe and is 'top down' in the sense that it relies upon language to effect change. However, when previous trauma (including small 't' traumas such as neglect, betrayals etc.) evokes physical responses, those biological events become lodged in the body even if we can arrive at a cognitive frame that resolves the issue. The body-centered therapies are more 'bottom up' and recognize the importance of the body in our emotions and, in turn, our emotions in our everyday experiences (See Damasio here). "The body keeps the score". (This ties in with the concept of allopathic load which has been associated with susceptibility to disease and illness).
"..a newly evolving definition of what is meant by a 'self'-one that isn't solely psychological in nature but includes the deeper, wordless levels of the brain and body's nervous circuitry-s in the process of emerging." (This is not a new concept as others have written of the body as the repository of the unconscious. What is new is the way in which some of the new neurosciences are corroborating this).
"..the body has a way of remembering those things we most wish to forget." This fits nicely with an observation of Alexander McLeod:"We are made most specifically by the things we cannot bear to do."
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) involves staring death in the face such as combat situations or violent personal assault. "Moreover the diagnosis requires that the person experiencing the trauma must have responded with 'intense fear, helplessness or horror..'" The author refers to this as big T trauma and argues that there are many episodes of 'little t trauma' leading to what she calls post-traumatic stress, often carried as bodily symptoms. These are not rare with one study stating that 60% of adult men and 51% of adult women experienced events that qualified as traumas. "We now know that there are many situations in which we are having powerful somatic reactions to experiences that may have long since slipped beneath the surface of awareness." She uses the interesting term 'physioneurosis' for the results of such events.
"Not only does the body remember, but the original story goes on being told and retold in disguised form-often as incomprehensibly powerful emotional and physical reactions or as inexplicable, self-damaging, repetitive patterns of behavior."
"...the primary underlying motive for secret keeping has to do with shame. Secrets are founded upon the belief that if certain aspects of your life and history were to see daylight, you would not be regarded as an acceptable human being; you would be seen, and see yourself, as outside the pale of decency, the shameful violator of some kind of taboo. When it comes to holding back or opening up, fears of spoiling other people's images of you or of disrupting important relationships are always being weighed in the balance against the heavy psychological and interpersonal burdens of living alone with the information."
"A number of research studies indicate that 'abused men and boys tend to identify with the aggressor and later victimize others whereas abused women are prone to become attached to abusive men and allow themselves and their offspring to be victimized further."
The new body therapies or power therapies use the body's memory of past events to gain access to regions deep within the emotional brain...the limbic system, where oversensitive networks of reacting have been established.
I found this book very useful as an update on thinking in these areas. I was a bit frustrated that in the rich clinical descriptions she uses all the individuals are women. Any men mentioned are simply abusive either emotionally or physically or unavailable emotionally (which she would define as emotional abuse). One of her cases involves a women who, in her eyes, had a very satisfactory marriage stating that she had a comfortable home, enjoyed her children etc. when her world came apart as her husband abruptly told her that she needed a lawyer as he wanted a divorce. She learned that he had extramarital affair. The book focuses on her response to this unexpected and devastating turn of events and we only learn later that her husband had been dealing with the death of his own father when this affair developed. This led me to wonder what role she saw for herself in helping her husband cope with an event that is well recognized as highly significant in any man's life...who was emotionally unavailable to whom? The book does not explore this at all.
A smaller quibble, though she uses the term 'felt experience' in the book, she does not refer to Eugene Gendlin, who, I believe, first used the term. In any case his work fits in with the concepts in the book and it seems strange that it is nowhere referred to.
Despite these issues, I think the book is worthwhile reading for anyone involved in counseling.
September 13, 2017
First, let me say that I desperately hate the title of this book because it is so sensationalistic. However, this was my second time reading through the book and both times I found it extremely informative. It really helped me rewire the ways I thought about "little-t trauma" and helped me give myself permission to work on the fears and anxieties I have tied up in "things that were once experienced as overwhelming" without downplaying them.
February 16, 2025
The book was very long and it did not really delve into the body holding trauma and the ways to deal with it to the later half in which it delve into 2 experimental therapies that helped people deal with the pain.
February 9, 2009
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.
Another look at the theory that memories are held within the body if the trauma occurs during pre-verbal years. The book only covers two therapeutic methods - EMDR and the Pesso Boyden System - but it covers them in-depth including the author's personal experiences with them.
Another look at the theory that memories are held within the body if the trauma occurs during pre-verbal years. The book only covers two therapeutic methods - EMDR and the Pesso Boyden System - but it covers them in-depth including the author's personal experiences with them.
August 20, 2011
A study of how "subconscious" memories of past traumatic events can conflict with conscious memories. Scarf used the details of actual individuals — herself and four or five women she interviewed over a period of months or years — to illustrate how past traumas could interfere with current coping skills and happiness. This examination led her to explore body-oriented therapeutic methods which appeared in the 1990s. Reading this book had me revisiting early-childhood memories of my own, and wondering if they impact my functioning today. I learned of this one from an interview with the author on KUOW's The Beat.
August 2, 2009
There is much to be learned in this book despite its ponderous tone and intense and sometimes unnecessary detail. Maggie Scarf makes very clear the body mind connection as a tool to unearth earlier unconscious truths. Our posture, stance, physical limitations can sometimes be a window to our pysche and this is worth knowing
October 16, 2009
I learned about subtle forms of manipulation, difficult to identify and explain, that I had been subject to. I learned to trust myself more and not be so open to other's alternative explanations of events. I highly recommend this to anyone in a damaging relationship.
December 4, 2008
i would have liked more techniques, healing opportunities etc. i felt like 'okay, yes, now what?'
April 27, 2009
I enjoyed this book immensely. It gave me great insight into all of my past relationships. Thanks, soul-crushing relationships for beating up my inner child and making me who I am today.
Read
April 16, 2011Great explanation of the EMDR process and how past experiences effect our everyday interactions.
Currently reading
June 7, 2011an easy read that shouldnt be. i love it so far.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews