Unspeakable Truths and Happy Endings: Human Cruelty and the New Trauma Therapy

by Rebecca Coffey

With the electrifying tales of 15 survivors of catastrophic human cruelty at its narrative core, Unspeakable Truths & Happy Endings resoundingly illuminates both the necessity and difficulty of compassionate, sensible listening to survivors' tales of trauma.The book journalistically explores the affects of survivors's stories on compassionate listeners -- a group that includes therapists but that also includes friends, family, and even survivors themselves as they work and re-work the realities of their own experience. Along the way, the book addresses the flip side of compassionate listening; squabbles about victimhood and recovered memory. The book concludes that, as thinking and caring inhabitants of a menacing world, we must all learn to hear unspeakable truths. At the same time that we risk accepting the truths about violence and degradation that survivors' memories hold, we must reasonably engage critical thinking when memories of violence and degradation stretch the limits of our credulity. We owe it to survivors to listen compassionately; we owe it to ourselves to listen prudently.

Genres: Psychology

226 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

By day Rebecca Coffey is a science journalist, contributing to Scientific American, Discover, and Vermont Public Radio. She also presents a weekly radio spot, Family Friendly Science, on the nationally syndicated show, Daybreak USA. By night she is a novelist and humorist. Hysterical: Anna Freud's Story is due out in May 2014 from She Writes Press. Nietzsche's Angel Food Cake: And Other "Recipes" for the Intellectually Famished was published in October 2013 by Beck & Branch.