James Charles

About

The myth I would most like to dispel is that you have to be certain about what happened before you are allowed to get help for it. A great many people carry a partial account, a set of impressions, and a persistent doubt about their own reliability. Certainty is not required. Abuse often leaves exactly that pattern, a mixture of vivid fragments and long blanks, and waiting until the record is complete means waiting indefinitely. We work with an incomplete account, which is what almost every account turns out to be. Nothing about the treatment depends on establishing a version that would satisfy a court. I did my clinical training in community mental health, where the accounts I heard were rarely tidy and the difficulties they produced were entirely real. Tidiness is not the standard here. If doubt about your own memory has kept you out, it need not.