END OF THE HOUR

A mental health professional faces her own fragility.

Psychotherapist Jarvis, host of the podcast Grief Is My Side Hustle, draws on her own experiences and those of her patients in a candid memoir about trauma. Jarvis was 9 when a friend’s brother drowned, a devastating event that incited profound feelings of loss and fear. Those feelings were exacerbated at home: Her father was away each weekday working in New York City; her mother cried every night. “It felt like we were all hanging on by a thread,” Jarvis writes; she felt “constantly on the verge of panic.” At first, she took to self-comforting by overeating, but by the time she was 13, she had devised another method of dealing with pain. “People were impressed with my caretaking skills,” she writes, “and, from the outside, it seemed like I was in total control. Underneath the surface I was all anxiety, self-doubt, and self-loathing.” Those symptoms led her to seek therapy when she was 23, and she was diagnosed with “anxiety and intermittent depression.” Because of her positive experience with her therapist, she trained as a therapist herself. With her own practice, married, and the mother of three children, Jarvis fell apart after the deaths of her parents: Two years after her father’s death and two months after her mother’s, she could no longer function. “I had lost more than my bearings,” she writes. At a treatment center, she was diagnosed with complex trauma, which happens “when a person who has experienced past trauma lingers again in fear without support or relief. Compound trauma happens when more than one overwhelmingly bad thing happens in a short span of time.” Her mother’s death, she realized, “had swept away everything in my life that was stable, leaving behind old and new pain.” The author’s forthright memoir will resonate with readers in emotional pain.

A frank chronicle of healing.