When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.

It is less painful, it turns out, to feel betrayed than to feel forgotten.

We hesitate, in the face of change, because change is loss. But if we don’t accept some loss – for Tamitha, the loss of her baby photos – we can lose everything.

Like Elizabeth, we can take on a catastrophe to stop ourselves feeling and thinking – and to avoid responsibility for our own intimate acts of destruction.

But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things

beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.