visit Maggie Scarf's website for more about her, a review, an Elle Magazine interview, and a book excerpt.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:

Reading Maggie Scarf's groundbreaking new book could change your life. In Secrets, Lies, Betrayals, the bestselling author of Unfinished Business, Intimate Partners, and Intimate Worlds brilliantly explores how the body holds on to painful episodes from the past including secrets we may be keeping even from ourselves and how we can release them to live freer, healthier lives.

The body has a unique memory system, in which early trauma and deeply buried feelings become woven into the fabric of our physical being. Certain events can trigger these body memories, which may then manifest themselves symptomatically as persistent anger, mood swings, headaches, muscle tension, and fatigue. These echoes from the past also cause destructive patterns in our lives and relationships.

Why does a beautiful, successful woman like Claudia seek out abusive, explosively tense relationships in which she is forced to hide the truth about herself? Why does the presence of a strange woman's name in her husbands cell phone directory make Karen feel physically ill, to the point where she cannot get through her daily life? And why does the author herself experience painful physical symptoms when she wrestles with contradictory memories of her mother? Exploring these and other personal narratives, Scarf reveals how the body, through its neurobiological systems, retains some of life's most important experiences and describes how new power therapies, such as reprocessing and psychomotor, have had immediate results where traditional therapies have had a lower success rate.

Grounded in recent breakthroughs in mind/body science and drawing on Scarf's personal experiences, this book is a masterpiece of research, analysis, and insight into the human psyche, and into human life.

From the Hardcover edition.
 

Publisher Comments:
"Scarf knows the intricacies of the family structure and, even better, knows how to write well about them. In Intimate Worlds, as in most of our lives, family is riveting, white-knuckle stuff."

--The Washington Post Book World

In Intimate Worlds, bestselling author Maggie Scarf takes on the most important, and most universal, subject of her distinguished career: the family. As the first social organization that we each encounter, the family is where we learn the most fundamental and enduring lessons of our lives. Yet for too many, those lessons turn out to be painful, perplexing, and emotionally crippling. In this luminous, beautifully written book, Scarf brilliantly examines the complex ways in which families create their own intimate rules and patterns of interaction, and how by understanding these dynamics we can each improve the quality of our own family life.

At the book's core are the stories of four fascinating families and the very different ways they enact the central issues of family life: power and intimacy; conflict and love; individuality and group identification. Spanning the spectrum of family health from dysfunctional through optimal, these families grapple with serious substance abuse, sexual problems, difficulties with attachment and nurturance, eating disorders, and buried resentments that surface generation after generation. As Maggie Scarf probes the motives and meanings of these compelling dramas, she reveals the essential truths of how families shape human identity. Combining lucid analysis with warm human understanding, Intimate Worlds is a major work that both clarifies and deepens our knowledge of family relationships.

"Wrought with care and commitment, it is meticulously researched and will, I think, serve as a valuable resource for families struggling to understand themselves."

--Los Angeles Times

Review:
How families shape each member's expectations, patterns of emotional reactivity, self-acceptance or self-hatred is the theme of Scarf's enlightening report. Combining interpretive analysis and case studies, and distilling a large body of research and clinical experience, the book should be as popular as her bestselling studies of marriage (Intimate Partners) and women and depression (Unfinished Business). Scarf found that many families are gripped by unconscious fantasies, unquestioned assumptions that result in the playing out of old agendas derived from parents' own pasts. She explores the maladaptive strategies that many families employ, such as scapegoating (sacrificing one family member to keep the family's operating system intact) and emotional triangling, an evasive maneuver to deflate escalating tensions in a two-way relationship. Scarf identifies five types of families, ranging from severely disturbed to polarized to optimal, and she organizes her material around this framework, a scale that was devised by psychiatrist W. Robert Beavers in the mid-1970s. Special attention is paid to the effects on a family of alcoholism, eating disorders, incest and sexual infidelity. Included are ``tasks,'' or therapeutic exercises, designed to strengthen familial bonds. This is a resource for families trying to improve communication, to deal with anger, frustration, ambivalence. Author tour. (Oct.) Publishers Weekly, 08/28/1995*
 

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