I admit it, I was a little miffed when Oprah came on 60 minutes to uncover a “Life changing story”—her discovery of the ACE report and the strong evidence of childhood trauma contributing to many later- in- life health and social problems issues. This is not news to me. In May of 2009 I began my research into women and trauma and came upon the ACE report. I recall thinking to myself how did I not know about this? And then how does everybody not know about this?! When I found

It was my first real job. I was 16 years old and working as a check-out clerk at a local grocery store. I loved the independence of making my own money, and I had a cool boss as a bonus. He was probably in early 40s, but he acted like a teenager. He cracked jokes, stuck around to play Pac Man after the place closed, and didn’t let much ruffle his feathers. He made work fun—for a while. After some time, he began making inappropriate comments, cloaked as a joke. Comments like,

Several years back I was sitting around a kitchen table chatting with two friends with whom I am very close. One of them was Paula (name changed for privacy). We were reminiscing about our college days and we got to talking about various regrets, mostly involving alcohol. Paula began telling us of an experience she had that involved excessive drinking and a boat. Through a bit of uncomfortable laughter she described an evening during which she got more intoxicated than she

Years ago I identified myself as the problem in my marriage. I felt that the only explanation for being so repulsed by intimacy was that I must have had some long ago traumatic experience that damaged me; I just needed to fix myself. Back then I also thought I needed to remember what had happened to me in order to “get better”. This was during the early 90’s, a time when the subject of “false memories” was a hot topic and clinicians were under fire for planting “memories” in