Madness or Knowing the Unbearable Truth

The Impossible Choice offers readers a narrative of the relationship between a therapist and her patient who desperately wants to discover her past. With no memory and no way of knowing what was real, her long therapeutic journey was to last 26 years, half her lifetime. Her only reality was the life she lived in the presence of her therapist. The narrative unfolds to reveal a story of horrific events that must be hidden, yet can no longer be kept secret. It sheds light on how chronic long-term traumatisation within a closed family circle can create madness in a vulnerable and lonely child, and helps reader gain an understanding of the enigmatic phenomena of Dissociated Identity Disorder.

Having been terrorized into silence, destroying her ability to use language in a house of secrets and lies, the therapy reveals how this patient struggles to come out of her autistic-like state in search of ways to find her past, her ''self'' and her voice. In this struggle, the reade