Featured Writer of the Month

Dr. Aphrodite Matsakis, Author & Therapist

"There was a cost to write those books."

Aphrodite Matsakis is a writer who writes about the raw edges of emotional upheaval and how to make the journey back from that edge. A practicing therapist and the author of ten books on mental health, she helps readers who have been raped, molested or abused find answers to questions such as “Can I love again?” “Can anyone love me?”

Her most popular book is Trust After Trauma: A Guide to Relationships for Trauma Survivors and Those Who Love Them. She believes it strikes a chord with so many people, “Because relationships are the core of life and there is little joy without it.” The book she’s written that is most dear to her is Survivor Guilt. “It’s the skinniest book I wrote but the most important,” she said. Another of her favorites is I Can’t Get Over It: A Handbook for Trauma Survivors.

Dr. Matsakis’s writing skills and knowledge of human behavior come together in the lecture hall where she teaches Psychology 100, Psychology of Women, Traumatology, Counseling Theory, and Child Psychology as a professor at the University of Maryland and at Johns Hopkins University. One of the challenges of the classroom is helping students realize that therapy requires genuine understanding for the victims of abuse and appreciating the struggles they must overcome to gain recovery, and that the study of psychology requires comprehending complex scientific topics. The professor said that most of her students “Have trouble separating Oprah Winfrey pop psychology from real psychology.”

Although it is not as intense as providing therapy, Dr. Matsakis allows that writing is demanding in it’s own way. “There’s a price to everything. There was a cost to write those books,” she warns would-be writers. “There are exhilarating moments and there’s a lot of drudgery, too. And it’s a lot of saying no to fun things.” This therapist questions whether having a strong creative compulsion is such a great thing. “Sometimes I wonder... I don’t pathologize [my drive to write] any more, but it complicates your life.”

Dr. Matsakis’s books can be ordered from New Harbinger Publications at
1-800-748-6273 or visit her website at matsakis.com.