Whatever Happened To Me?

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ME?

What if trauma doesn't simply hurt us? What if it exiles parts of us?

For more than thirty years, Christine Joanna Hart searched for an answer to what had happened to her.

She had survived a profoundly fractured childhood. She had built a life, become a Fleet Street journalist and professional investigator, written a bestselling memoir and learned how to survive almost anything.

But survival was not the same thing as being whole.

Hart searched through psychology, psychotherapy, spirituality, mysticism and the hidden architecture of trauma, looking for something that could explain a question conventional language never quite answered:

Where did the rest of me go?

Whatever Happened to Me? is the book that grew from that search and from the therapeutic approach Hart eventually developed: Exiled Self Therapy, the Art of Retrieval.

Its central proposition is deceptively simple.

Trauma does not only leave memories behind. At moments of terror, shame, abandonment or overwhelming loss, aspects of the self can become psychologically exiled: the child who trusted, the girl who spoke, the woman who desired, the part that could create, fight, play, love or belong.

We may spend decades treating the symptoms while never asking what became of the person who disappeared.

Hart began asking a different question.

What if healing is not about becoming somebody new, but retrieving who was lost?

Part memoir, part psychological investigation and part journey into the extraordinary, Whatever Happened to Me? moves through trauma and dissociation, parts of the self, dreams, shamanism, soul retrieval, near-death experience, mysticism and the darker symbolic territory Hart calls the Dark Tree.

The book does not demand that psychology and spirituality choose separate rooms.

Instead, Hart explores the territory where they meet: where the unconscious speaks in images, where the body remembers what the conscious mind has forgotten, and where ancient traditions of soul retrieval begin to look uncannily like another language for psychological fragmentation and reintegration.

Drawing upon a lifetime spent investigating hidden things, and her later work as a psychotherapeutic counsellor, Hart develops the ideas that became Exiled Self and Sovereignty Therapy: an approach concerned not merely with managing trauma, but with recovering authorship of one's own inner life.

Because perhaps the question was never only:

What happened to me?

Perhaps the more important question is:

Who did I leave behind when it happened?

And how do I bring them home?

About Christine Joanna Hart

Christine Joanna Hart is an author, former Fleet Street journalist, professional investigator and MBACP registered psychotherapeutic counsellor.

Her journalism has appeared in publications including The Sunday Times and Daily Mail. She has worked in professional investigation for more than twenty-five years, and her first memoir, Searching for Daddy, became a Sunday Times bestseller and reached No. 3 in WHSmith.

After more than three decades exploring trauma, psychology, spirituality and altered states of consciousness, Hart developed Exiled Self Therapy, the Art of Retrieval, integrating psychotherapeutic work with parts work, symbolic exploration and ideas drawn from traditions of soul retrieval.

Her work explores trauma, sovereignty, identity, mysticism and the parts of ourselves we lose along the way.

She writes and practises under her own name, Christine Joanna Hart. Readers can find her therapeutic work and other books by searching for Christine Joanna Hart online.