ABSTRACT
Within a month of my first therapy session, back in 1998, words began pouring. My therapist’s initial response (“It’ll take more than two weeks to do this work”) together with his weekly warm welcome and interest unblocked my vow of silence, necessarily taken decades earlier, like removing a log-jam. Then came his unwitting use of the word “privileged”, in response to some of my disclosures about upbringing. Protest erupted. I made a commitment to myself to tell him just how unprivileged I rated my experiences – until I was stuffing envelope after envelope with sheets of handwriting I had to get into the first available post-box. That he might not have time to read it all didn’t register. What mattered then was writing, and sending, every single detail of the memories that were flooding in, together with what I understood about what I was remembering from my perspective as trainee-therapist. I was determined to replace family “stories” with my own truths. Yes, I felt guilty about the extra time Sam might be spending that I wasn’t paying him for, but when, after about a year, he said gently, “You can’t tell me your whole life”, I took that as a challenge. And continued.
