Healing Amelia

There are two intertwined narratives in this book. The first story is that of Amelia, an educated Latin American woman who fell in love with a vacationing American schoolteacher and eventually followed him to the United States. It’s not quite a love story. It’s the story of what happens in a loving relationship after the Disney movie ends, after the prince carries away the princess on his white horse to live happily ever after. It’s the story of Amelia’s life before and after the great romantic connection faded and after the prince’s great white horse had been put to pasture. It describes the healing of both the childhood wounds and post-marital wounds that had to heal in order for Amelia’s marriage to work. Amelia’s story reveals itself—sometimes in current events, sometimes in childhood experiences—over the course of 22 months of psychotherapy.

The second narrative describes how Parts and Memory Therapy works—as it heals Amelia and reveals the fascinating details of her inner world. This world, like the inner worlds of other normal people, contains many selves: angry, sad, lonely, loving and nurturing, young, old, caring and uncaring. As Amelia visualizes her many Parts, or subpersonalities, some appear exactly as she remembers herself at different ages of her life. Others have no resemblance to her at all—in fact they seem to be products of a vivid and sometimes strange imagination.

The story of discovery and work with personified Parts of the self forms the core of the book. (The Disney/Pixar movie Inside Out has already introduced the larger public to the idea that we all have internal thinking and feeling Parts of ourselves that sometimes act on their own.) Amelia’s internal Parts of self included Postpartum Me, Old Woman, Head-Banging Little Girl, The Witch, Gypsy, Love, Old Man, Monster-Head, the Hippie, and more.

Parts and Memory Therapy is currently the only psychotherapy that focuses on the traumatized Parts of the self as targets for healing while also explicitly grounding the healing interventions in the neuroscience of memory reconsolidation.

Amelia’s therapy healed or brought remission to her overwhelming rage, her stubborn, long-lasting postpartum depression, as well as that depression’s apparent side effect of failure in maternal bonding with her daughter. Additionally, and surprisingly, the therapy also brought remission to Amelia’s PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome) and more severe PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder).

An important theme throughout the book was Amelia’s question about having another child. She wanted to do so but wasn’t sure she should, given her rocky marriage and her doubts about whether her husband would be there for her if her depression returned. But following her success in the first five months of therapy, and the major reduction in most of her symptoms, Amelia and he...