Synopsis "Undertow: Surviving the Predatory Psychiatrist: A Memoir"
Undertow: Surviving the Predatory Psychiatrist-A Memoir, is only the eighth-since 1976-memoir by a survivor of therapist abuse, spotlighting the well-kept secret that such malfeasance occurs as often as priest abuse. In the well-heeled community of Westport, Connecticut, in 1985, fifty-three-year-old Trudy Seagraves secured the services of the much-heralded New Age Psychiatrist Harry Brown. Within weeks he helped clarify her issues with a failing marriage, and she and her husband separated peacefully. But the nightmares disturbing her sleep since childhood worsened. Brown offered hypnotherapy, using regressive Bioenergetic techniques in which he was well schooled. Were she not pacified by his stellar credentials (board certified in Psychiatry and neurology), and intense local esteem, she'd have fled his promise of healing the unconscious through expressive work on the double bed in his office. Three months into hypnotherapy, Seagraves found herself lying on the bed screaming, alarmed at reliving long-buried incest, suspecting her night terrors were the aftermath of her father's raping her. Her psychiatrist lovingly embraced her after each traumatic regression, until, finally, she lost the ability to differentiate her father from the healer. Profoundly regressed after three years under Brown's care, alternately wooed and sadistically rejected, Seagraves deteriorated from a seasoned medical writer, soprano soloist, and portrait artist into a gaunt, phobic, and suicidal woman no longer able to work, paint, sing-or leave. Moved to reveal her experience in Undertow: Surviving the Predatory Psychiatrist-A Memoir, the author lays bare her childhood trauma and the systematic annihilation of personhood she suffered when seeking recovery. Not until the day Brown committed a bizarre sexual act was she jolted out of her thrall. Fleeing, and desperate for clarity, she went home to dig out the many cassettes of sessions Brown had insisted on recording. After playing and transcribing several, Seagraves gradually came to understand how she had been drawn into the cult of a person whose motives defy moral and rational explanations. Why couldn't she leave? In situations so perfectly replicating early abuse, such persons often doubt their own rights, have difficulty with boundaries in protection of their own egos, and cannot set realistic limitations on those who wish to injure their interpersonal space. The inclusion of direct conversation from over two dozen recorded sessions allows the reader to experience, in this unprecedented document, the intentional weaving of a silky web around a vulnerable woman. [2630 char w/ spaces]
