"This book recreates the first eight sessions in a course of therapy from the points of view of both the patient and the therapist." "The method is Deep Feeling Therapy, an offshoot of the Primal Therapy developed by Dr. Arthur Janov to allow the patient to directly confront and "go through" buried traumatic experiences of the past so as to gain freedom from their power to cripple the emotions and poison life." "The patient is Theresa Sheppard Alexander, the author of this book, who turned to Primal Therapy in near-despair at the age of twenty after a downward spiral of underachievement and failed relationships forced her to the realization that her young life had become a cul-de-sac from which she could not escape without help. Today Theresa Alexander is a therapist herself who has evolved the original premises and techniques of Primal Therapy into an extended and expanded form. But at the time this book describes, she is a confused and suspicious young woman who must be led carefully and sensitively back to a childhood she desperately does not want to revisit and to pain she shrinks from bringing back again." "Through the eyes of the patient and those of the therapist guiding her, we follow the suspenseful, often surprising, and ultimately successful therapeutic process from the first cracks in the wall of forgetting set up by the mind as a shield against terrible truths to the final crumbling of that wall, as the patient at last "faces the wolf." We see the tug-of-war within the patient, as well as the complex bond between patient and therapist, as memories of growing up in a dysfunctional family return one by one - memories of a mother unable to protect her daughter from a father's savage physical and psychological abuse. And finally, we gain a sense of the liberation and self-empowerment engendered when the unthinkable is thought, the unspeakable is spoken, and the unbearable is borne one last time before that burden can be cast aside."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved