And Then it All Turned Out Not to be True

Cherryl de Veth still vividly remembers one night when she was seven years old, and her parents were downstairs, deep into their nightly screaming match. Her routine response was to cower in the bathroom until her mother would come in and shout at Cherryl to stop being frightened. On this night, Cherryl did something new. Afraid of her mother's anger, Cherryl suppressed her fear and play-acted that she was happy. Her mother saw her calm demeanor and left her in peace. For years afterward, no matter what Cherryl faced, she used the escape tool she learned that night. It gradually became a distorted truth: The way to survive life is to suppress your emotions. We all use coping mechanisms to navigate tough times. We keep the good mechanisms, and, if we're lucky, we outgrow the bad ones. In "And Then it All Turned Out Not to be True," Cherryl recounts how, like many of us, she clung to childhood survival tools and beliefs well into adulthood, even though they served her poorly. Her book traces the thread through the years of how her childhood views played out in her relationships with family, friends, partners, and children. She writes about how over time she came to realize that the beliefs she thought were true as a child were actually false. She saw that while life brings good and bad, by embracing her true, vulnerable, imperfect self and celebrating others as she found them, she was strong enough to weather both. Cherryl's story is that of an ordinary girl growing up in the Netherlands. But it is also about each of us, as we recognize and shed those beliefs about ourselves that we realize are not true so we can transform into the people we were meant to be.