This Happened To Me by Kate Price

This Happened to Me is a memoir that confronts Kate’s personal experiences, growing up in a small Appalachian town and traces her continuing journey as an adult to deal with childhood trauma.

Kate recounts a childhood lived in fear of a violent and sexually abusive father. This abuse stopped when her father left her mother for another woman, when Kate was in her teens. At eighteen, she escaped the poverty, violence and abuse silently endured in her family by moving to Boston to go to university.

Wrestling with her past, she was haunted by a strange patchwork of memories and troubling feelings.  Working with Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist specialising in recovered memory therapy and post-traumatic stress treatment, Kate recovered memories that her father had not only abused her as a child but had drugged her and trafficked her to other men as well.

Kate then went on to search for evidence of this past. With the help of an investigative journalist and over the course of ten years, through visiting her hometown and talking to friends and relatives, she was able to confirm her memories.  She discovered that her abuse had been handed down through generations of her family, and bringing it into the open has fractured many family ties. This memoir is evidence of how she was able to break free from the cycle of family distress: to move from being a victim to a person who has been able to build a family life on her own terms and, through a professional life of research, advocacy and advice as a child sex trafficking expert, work for the benefit of others.

The unfolding of Kate’s awareness of her upbringing, family history, and how she has addressed her past is told in detail but without sensationalism. Her focus is not on the graphic details of her recovered memories but on the process of growing towards an understanding of her childhood. Some of Bessel van der Kolk’s ideas have been viewed with some scepticism by the scientific community. However, he has spent his professional career as a psychiatrist researching, writing and treating PTSD and trauma in children and adults. Whatever your view, Bessel van der Kolk’s treatment was just one of the stepping stones – along with education, investigation, strength and determination – that have led Kate to confront her experiences and build a positive, healthy life. 

This author does not exploit the trauma of difficult and painful childhood experiences but rather recounts her journey from fear and helplessness to empowerment in a clear and considered voice. Her account of moving forward from the challenges of her childhood to find fulfilment in her adult relationships and to focus on her work to prevent child abuse invites the reader’s respect and attention to the wider issues.

Reviewer: Clare Lyon

Allen & Unwin