How and why then do women engage with the sexual abuse recovery literature?
5.1 The simple answer is that for many women a history of sexual abuse helps them to make sense of their lives and their present unhappiness or distress. In addition, as the harm story and the healing discourse locate not only the cause of but also the solution to such problems within the minds of individual women, they also promise empowerment and a better life. Like other areas of self-help literature unhealthy, adult women may be constructed as the cause but the healthy adult woman is constructed as the solution. The recovery literature promises women a way to achieve this. 5.2 Whether they had continuous memories or not the reason women entered therapy and/or read self help books was because they were unhappy with at least some aspect of their lives. For the majority of women, particularly those who entered adulthood with no memory, the harm story was one that they were happy to accept, or perhaps needed to accept. It is this story which enables them to make the connection between
