There is no turning away from the past in Dispatches from the Couch; this beautiful, thoughtful memoir explores the legacies of trauma through the lens of a neuroscientist and her therapist. Tender, thought-provoking, and difficult, Hettes' story dances razor-thin territory of what we forget and what we remember, and who we become in the remaking of our stories. Brave, smart, and big-hearted. 

 -Tessa Fontaine, author of The Electric Woman and The Red Grove

"The [psychologists] of that era held little awareness regarding how predictably a tiny girl’s brain hard-wires for self-loathing when a man reaches his body into hers." Stacey Hettes, a neuroscientist and survivor of sexual violence, uses her scientific expertise and first-hand experience to map the inner workings of a traumatized brain. And like the brain searching for equilibrium, Hettes ricochets through time, tone, and narrative styles, trying to make sense of the senseless. "As if flipping the channel on a television, my brain pops over to the adage 'no use crying over spilt milk,' along with an image of a milk jug shattering to the floor... Do I have it in me to gather the pieces and patch them together?" So often, we call books unflinching, but Dispatches from the Couch beautifully flinches. In her story, Hettes hesitates, she backslides, she panics and obscures. And of course she does! She is contending not just with traumatic memory, but with the culture of silence, religious conservatism, and patriarchal social structures that can keep victims of sexual abuse trapped in a cycle of re-traumatization. On her therapist's couch, the little-girl Stacey trapped in a cell, the gold-star good girl she convinced herself she had to become to make up for shattering her family's Leave it to Beaver idyll, and the passionate, curious scientist who sees problems and possibility in the mind-body connection meet and make amends. Like Boy Erased and Somebody's Daughter, Dispatches from the Couch shows us that people can hurt and people can heal. An invaluable book.    

-Anna B. Sutton, LCMHCA, author of Savage Flower

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