The woman, who asked to be identified only as Karen, cannot recall the precise trigger that made her reach for a drink after 12 years of sobriety. But she does remember stumbling into the hospital in Lochgilphead, the nearest town. Intoxicated and near-delirious, she feared the suicidal impulses that had racked her since she was a teenager might prove too strong to resist.
Dr. Gordon Barclay was making his rounds that day. A consultant in general adult psychiatry with a passion for Goethe, he was a more attentive listener than the street drinkers who had served as Karen’s confidantes during past relapses. From her hospital bed, she told him about the sexual abuse in her early years, and how she’d learned to dull its searing legacy with alcohol. But the terror she felt while lying awake in bed as a young child, afraid to close her eyes, still lived inside her. It was a story she had told too many psychiatrists and psychologists, but the endless retelling had never changed the way she felt. It was as if she was always waiting for the abuse to begin again. In that way, she was still 5 years old. “Everything was tinged with fear,” says Karen, now in her mid-40s. “I was always driven by the past.”
.....Contrary to all she’d been told, the answer wasn’t more talk. It was less. Karen was trapped in her head, and with Barclay’s help, she saw that the way to fix her mind was to listen to her body. “I would hate to knock talking therapy, but it can encase you more in the trauma—you almost become stuck in it,” she says. “They’re really well-meaning people, but they screwed me up even worse.”[For more on this story, written by Matthew Green, go to: [Newsweek].
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