Past Tense
Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy
-
- R$ 77,90
-
- R$ 77,90
Descrição da editora
A brave and captivating graphic memoir about the power of therapy to heal anxiety and generational trauma
When Sacha Mardou turned forty-years-old, she was leading a life that looked perfect on the outside: happily married to the love of her life, enjoying motherhood and her six-year-old daughter, and her first book had just been published. But for reasons she couldn’t explain, the anxiety that had always plagued her only seemed to be getting worse and then, without warning, she began breaking out in terrible acne.
The product of a stoic, working-class British family, Sacha had a deeply seeded distrust of mental health treatment, but now, living the life she’d built in the US and desperate for relief, she finds herself in a therapist’s office for the first time. There she begins the real work of growing up: learning to understand her family of origin and the childhood trauma she thought she’d left hidden in the past but is still entangled in her present life.
Past Tense takes us inside Sacha’s therapy sessions, which over time become life-changing: She begins to come to terms with her turbulent and complicated upbringing, which centered around her now estranged father, who had a violent relationship with her mother and would later go to prison for sexually abusing her stepsister. With her therapist’s guidance, she sees how these wounds and other generational trauma has been passed through her family as far back as her grandmother’s experiences during The Blitz of World War Two. And she discovers modalities that powerfully shape her healing along the way, including the work of Bessel Van der Kolk and Richard Schwartz (Internal Family Systems).
As Sacha’s emotional life begins to unfreeze and she lets go of the shame she’s long held, she realizes that the work she’s doing and her love for her family can ripple outward too, changing her relationships now, and creating a new legacy for her daughter.
Bravely told, visceral, and profoundly moving, Past Tense is a story about our power to break free of the past--once and for all--and find hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mardou (Sky in Stereo) documents her therapeutic treatment in this frank and clear-eyed memoir. In 2015, 40-year-old British expat Mardou's seemingly contented life with her American husband and young daughter begins to unravel when she's wracked by intense anxiety, accompanied by bouts of acne. Though initially skeptical of therapy ("I'm British. We don't do therapy. We do sarcasm and alcoholism and football hooliganism"), she finds a skillful practitioner and begins to reconcile her suppressed memories of family traumas. These center on her complicated relationship with her Jehovah's Witness mother, who was raped by a family member at age 13; her rageful father's sexual abuse of her stepsister, Gail (for which he was imprisoned); and Gail's abuse of Mardou, when they were both young girls. Working first through cognitive behavioral therapy and later with a therapist who specializes in the internal family systems method (where one talks to the "parts" they've developed "as coping strategies to get through life," such as the "managers" who "protect our image" or the "firefighters" who "quash painful feelings via compulsions"), Mardou hopes to "break the line" of the "legacy burden" before it passes down to her daughter. Mardou convincingly charts her evolution from therapy cynic to take-charge advocate, and her sharply expressive graphics and neat lettering keep her text-heavy story fluid and immediate. The result is a potent testament to the power of reckoning with the past.
