After Shock - A Memoir

This is the story of an adolescent girl’s survival following electric shock treatments to enforce compliance. In a stark narrative, the girl recounts dysfunctional family dominance that forces her to escape further brain damage, death or suicide. The story moves through her experiences as a child in an adult psychiatric hospital where the patient/staff differences are often blurred. When “disowned and disinherited” by her dysfunctional family, she moves into adulthood, assumes a new identity, acquires and then loses a surrogate family through cancer, and becomes a psychiatric professional nurse, and ultimately achieves a Ph.D. in psychotherapy.

Her professional life involved patient care, psychiatric training for psychiatrists and nurses, psychoanalysis, and sexual abuse by her own therapist. But there was always a need to cover up her early history and the daunting implications of possible brain damage from her early electric shock. She married a gentle physician, and with her own motherhood, found it imperative to go back to the memories and losses for a reconciliation with her past through successful treatment.

The story is poignant, often funny, often gritty, and always compelling.