Early traumatic memories affect us all, every day-but in startling ways that we are only beginning to understand.You are driving from one familiar place to another and realize upon arriving that you can't remember how you got there. Or, on a holiday trip home to see family, you find you are inexplicably fatigued. Perhaps it's your spouse, who has taken to disappearing for evenings at a time, and you're convinced that he or she is having an affair. Or it is a boss or colleague, who seems to switch to an alternate personality in the blink of an eye. You can never predict when it will happen, or why it does. The Myth of Sanity is a book about our common, but mostly invisible, dementia. In the first book to explore this topic, Martha Stout explores the profoundly fragmented nature of human awareness and offers a new understanding about the role played by traumatic memories in day-to-day life.Do people who have recovered from extreme trauma come to know something about awareness that the rest of us are never forced to learn? Through the lives of patients like Julia, a film editor who "woke up on Tuesday and found out that it was Friday"; Garrett, who experiences severe dissociative identity disorder; and Nathan, a psychiatrist himself, we come to understand that the answer is yes. Healing, wholeness, and the will to live our best lives, these elusive qualities are, ironically, lessons well taught by those whose lives have been shattered and remade.Author Bio: Martha Stout, Ph.D. is a clinical instructor in psychology in the psychiatry department of Harvard Medical School and a clinical associate at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her twenty-year private practice has specialized in the treatment of psychological trauma survivors.