My teacher threatened to rip my teeth out after raping me. But I blocked the memory until a surprising moment changed everything, reveals AMY GRIFFIN

After Amy Griffin narrowly lost a school election aged 12, one of her favourite teachers, Mr Mason, stopped her in the hallway. ‘You’re the real leader of this school’, he reassured her. 

His comment made Amy felt better about not winning. ‘I pulled my shoulders back, standing up straighter.’

She tucked Mr Mason’s words away in her memory, and got on with the rest of her life. Or at least, she thought that was what happened. But, as her devastating memoir The Tell shows, the human brain can completely blot out life’s most horrific memories. It wasn’t till years later, when she was undergoing psychedelic-assisted therapy, that Amy, now 48, realised that those words of Mr Mason’s had in fact been cunningly chosen. Using them was his way of exploiting her and grooming her. 

‘The body keeps the score.’ Bessel van der Kolk coined that expression as the title of his 2014 book about trauma recovery. No truer five words were ever spoken. In Amy’s case, her body certainly kept the score, while her mind did its utmost to forget it. For the next three decades, Amy seemed to need to exhaust and punish her body, and she had no idea why.

She became an obsessive runner: so addicted, so self-punishing, that she ended up needing three operations on her back.

She moved to New York, where she became a journalist, carried on running and swimming, and took up yoga. ‘It felt like something was chasing me,’ she writes, ‘a monster of some kind.’

She married a delightful, genuinely kind man called John, and they had two girls and two boys. As well as striving to be ‘a brilliant Manhattan mum’, she started her own investment firm for women. People said she had ‘the perfect life’. She thought, ‘I don’t even know what perfect means.’ Then one day her ten-year-old daughter said to her: ‘I feel like I don’t know you. You’re nice but you’re not real.’ Amy went out for a swim – ‘and I screamed at the bottom of the pool’.

It was then that John suggested she have psychedelic-assisted therapy, which requires taking a small amount of MDMA in pill form. It promises ‘a day with the you that you have forgotten’. John had researched and undergone that very therapy, and it had helped to open up his own memories. Amy was resistant to the idea, but decided to give it a go. And, five minutes into her eight-hour session with a therapist called Olivia, she said, ‘Why is he here? Mr Mason, from my middle-school…’

The horror came flooding back. ‘The glass case of denial had been shattered.’ She remembered the school toilets in which the sexual abuse happened, how Mason had tied her hands behind her back with a blue bandana, and said to her, ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll rip your teeth out.’ Four years later, when she was 16, he came up to her in the school car park and said, ‘One more time, for old time’s sake?’ and she’d gone along with it, because ‘he had power over me; he was the keeper of my greatest shame’.

Remembering it, she convulsed with rage, wailing on the floor of her marital Manhattan bathroom.

Some scientists are sceptical about psychedelic-assisted therapy. A paper published last year in Nature said that psychedelics can sometimes provoke false memories: ‘they do not necessarily prefer accuracy’. But Amy’s memories are so physically specific that they have a real ring of accuracy about them.

From then on, she shifts to trying to bring Mason, who is not a registered sex offender, to justice.

This book does not bring the ‘good’ ending or closure that Amy or we hope for. For her experiences to have any clout in the judicial system, she knows they’ll need to be corroborated by others who suffered something similar from Mason.

She has a clear memory of Mason putting his hand on the shoulder of a girl called Claudia. She meets up with her, and describes what happened. On hearing it, Claudia almost tries to lean away. But she denies that any such thing happened to her.

‘Was she tightening up because there was something she, too, couldn’t face?’ Amy wonders. Then she receives an anonymous postcard with a mysterious message from one of the old schoolmates she tracked down: ‘I didn’t have it in me to tell you the truth.’

It’s too late, anyway, to bring the man to justice. Time has run out under the statute of limitations. It’s deeply frustrating.

Has life got better or worse for Amy since she allowed herself to revisit her past and unearth the truth? Horrifying though the truth of what happened to her is, she knows now that ‘in running away from it [the trauma], I was also running from the best things life has to offer – freedom and happiness and real relationships with the people around me. You can’t have light without the darkness.’

• The Tell by Amy Griffin is published by Ebury at £18.99 (288pp) and is available now from the Mail Bookshop. Names have been changed.