After Shock - A Memoir

About the Book

This is the story of an adolescent girl’s survival following electric shock treatments to enforce compliance. In a stark narrative, the girl recounts dysfunctional family dominance that forces her to escape further brain damage, death or suicide. The story moves through her experiences as a child in an adult psychiatric hospital where the patient/staff differences are often blurred. When “disowned and disinherited” by her dysfunctional family, she moves into adulthood, assumes a new identity, acquires and then loses a surrogate family through cancer, and becomes a psychiatric professional nurse, and ultimately achieves a Ph.D. in psychotherapy.

Her professional life involved patient care, psychiatric training for psychiatrists and nurses, psychoanalysis, and sexual abuse by her own therapist. But there was always a need to cover up her early history and the daunting implications of possible brain damage from her early electric shock. She married a gentle physician, and with her own motherhood, found it imperative to go back to the memories and losses for a reconciliation with her past through successful treatment.

The story is poignant, often funny, often gritty, and always compelling.

About the Author

Margo Bouer is a retired psychotherapist and psychiatric nurse currently residing in Southern California with her husband and pets. She was termed a delinquent, subsequently subjected to electro-convulsive treatments and psychiatric hospitalization as a child. She escaped from her dysfunctional family and forged a life for herself by maturing quickly and surviving in an adult world. She entered the fields of psychiatry and psychoanalytic therapy, but her underlying fear was always having her past exposed. This is the story of a lost childhood due to exposure to shock treatment and a need to survive.