Content warning: The story you’re about to hear is quite graphic, with references to childhood sexual abuse and sexual assault. While I’ve built my whole career on helping people challenge and crush their negative thoughts in the here-and-now, let me tell you the story of a woman whose recovery required us to revisit a traumatic event from her childhood. I used a powerful technique called memory rescripting, developed in the 1990s by Drs. Merv Smucker, Edna Foa, and colleagues.1 Since then, a number of newer studies have supported memory rescripting as a promising treatment for some trauma survivors. Like every technique in therapy, it won’t be for everyone—for certain patients, however, it can be helpful2, 3, 4 as you’ll see in this article. The story features a young woman who came for the treatment of agoraphobia. Her fear was specific and intense: public transportation. Buses, trains, taxis, airplanes—any form of public transportation where she couldn’t immediately escape filled her with terror. Aside from that, she was doing well. She was a bright student at a …