i had a new patient referred to me last week and it's hard to stop thinking about her case. she's in her late twenties, living the life of a decent tree hugger, bulgur, hemp seeds, granola, lentils, the whole thing. doesn't drink. and her liver is finished. strangest thing. there's no pathology, no disease, virus, bacteria, nothing - she has the liver of someone who spent her life drinking heavily, but she doesn't, hasn't, won't. and it when they told her at the hospital that she had the liver of a fifty-year old alcoholic that she had the panic attack that eventually led her to me. us. the office, whatever. she just went beserk and wailed and screamed and lashed out and was sweating and she told me she couldn't even see, she was so far gone. her words, not mine. anyway. it turns out she has had a traumatic childhood, with a violent father who beat her and her mother and was generally threatening and abusive in all possible ways - women's magazines have dealt with that kind of shit so much that i don't even need to get into it and people can imagine what i'm talkign about. or anyway they think they can and they have all sorts of images popping up in their minds, but of course they can't truly understand. it's impossible to understand from outside. even victims can't truly, really, explain how it feels because when they're in it they cope somehow and think this is all normal - it becomes normal. and then once they're out and healing they usually block a lot of memories - they need to forget and far be it from me to call this unhealthy. but once they're truly out they can't explain it. they know how it felt, they know the knot of terror and anguish and guilt and depression, the pit of despair, the feeling of always being stretched because their fight or flight response is trigger happy, the exhaustion of always being on gard. so she had that kind of childhood that books and articles try to dissect and explain and never can really and that makes ladies cry as they read the latest child locked in a closet novel. and she did get out and she did block a lot of it out. and now i'd say and she'd say she's pretty much healed from it all. only growing up that way is a dangerous thing, since we all tend to go back, to run even towards what we know, and all that she's forgotten could become reality again if she let it happen. patterns she called it. she was very self-aware and knew that that was always a danger. she refused to drink much alcohol, even, having read all the statistics about children of alcoholic parents - not that these are very near the mark, but hey, if they manage to steer a few kids away from a lifetime of misery, loneliness, bitterness and liver disease, you know... just my two cents. in any case, not drinking was a choice for her. so was living a super healthy lifestyle - the kind that you read about, again, in women's magazines, the kind that makes you scratch your head and wonder how the hell people manage to live like that - not that it's bad or unhealthy - on the contrary, it's so extremely healthy that you have to wonder where anyone can find the time and energy to devote to mundane issues such as food or hobbies. in any case, a very stable and nice young lady, with an old disgusting liver. another choice she'd made was to cut all ties to her father once she got out of that bad situation with him. she didn't even know where he lived or where he worked - if at all, work not being too much of a habit of his. as far as she knew, she had vanished for him too - he had no other family to link her to him, and she had taken a few steps to be hard to find, should he ever try. like i said, she seems rather smart and aware. but her story eventually got weird. i hadn't even mentioned the panick attack, or the reason that brought her to my office yet, but i was about to. we'd already gone over past traumas, and now i wanted to know what was going on right then and there - not that i'd use that language with my patients - but i had paused, and was picking my words carefully and silently when she took her glasses off and started to cry. she was not wailing, just silently allowing tears to run down her cheeks. and then she said: "when i was ten years old, my eyesight went nearly as bad as my father's." after that her crying got mor eintense and it was a few minutes before she was able to continue.