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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nTara Westover\u2019s acclaimed memoir, Educated<\/a><\/em>, is about many things: growing up in an extreme fundamentalist family under the thrall of a paranoid father, in an environment both idyllic and abusive; her attempts to break free; and education in both the sense of formal learning and its more expansive meaning–the process of self-discovery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I happened to listen to Educated<\/em> after finishing a monthly case conference led by Dr. Jane Rubin about working as a psychotherapist with developmental trauma. The memoir is a compelling example of the complexities we explored: the traumas themselves; the additional and more severe consequences of misattuned responsiveness from a child’s primary caregivers; and the terror of change that makes the dread not<\/em> to repeat as powerful as the dread to<\/em> repeat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A reviewer summarizes Westover\u2019s dilemma: \u201cWill she come home? Can she come home? Or will\nhome be more damaging to her spirit than the broader dangerous world her father\nfears?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A better question is can she\nleave<\/em> home? Educated<\/em> illustrates repeatedly the psychological difficulty and\ncost of doing so. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In \u201cTo Free the Spirit from its Cell,\u201d Bernard Brandschaft\n(1993) writes of the danger change poses to attachment, and the pathological\naccommodations necessary to preserve \u201cemotionally enslaving early ties.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Therapists encounter these dimensions of trauma all the time. Patients who have seemingly progressed but who cannot go further remain, in Brandschaft\u2019s words, \u201cimprisoned in the gulags of their minds.\u201d What might seem a baffling resistance is an expression of identity grounded in fierce loyalty and love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a Fresh Air<\/em> interview<\/a>, Westover says, \u201cAbuse is foremost an assault on the mind. If you\u2019re going to abuse someone, you have to invade their reality and you have to distort it.\u201d She describes how abuse is normalized and depicted as deserved, how shame is internalized. She was only able to break away after she had \u201cgrown her own mind,\u201d become a different self\u2014one who still hopes for, but no longer awaits, signs that her family has changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A patient once gave me \u201cThe\nCity,\u2019 by C.P. Cavafy (1894), which reads in part: <\/p>\n\n\n\n You said: \u201cI\u2019ll go to another country, go to another shore,<\/p> find another city better than this one.<\/p> Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong . . . <\/p> You won\u2019t find a new country, won\u2019t find another shore.<\/p> This city will always pursue you. . . <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n As Educated<\/em> so beautifully attests, it is not impossible to free the spirit from its cell, but it is heartbreakingly difficult.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tara Westover\u2019s acclaimed memoir, Educated, is about many things: growing up in an extreme fundamentalist family under the thrall of a paranoid father, in an environment both idyllic and abusive; her attempts to break free; and education in both the … Continue reading