Zainab Hassan

About

The idea I would most like to dispel is that recovery means the memory stops mattering. People expect treatment to produce indifference and are disconcerted when it does not, concluding that it has failed. Indifference was never the goal. Survivors who do well still find the memory significant. What changes is that it stops arriving uninvited, stops dictating their choices, and stops costing them the following three days whenever it surfaces. We aim at that. It is a more honest target than forgetting and a lot more achievable. Group settings came before my own practice, and the people who did best were never the ones who stopped caring about what happened. If you were expecting indifference, the actual outcome is better than that. Significance is allowed to remain. What we remove is the cost attached to it. The memory keeps its meaning and loses its authority.