Can psychedelic therapy unlock buried memories of childhood trauma? According to venture capitalist Amy Griffin, the answer is a resounding yes. In her acclaimed 2025 memoir The Tell, Griffin details how MDMA-assisted therapy helped her recover repressed memories of sexual abuse by a trusted teacher during middle school. Her story offers a compelling case study of memory recovery through psychedelic intervention, though it also enters contentious scientific territory where experts debate the reliability of drug-induced recollections and the very existence of repressed memories.
Her memoir, which landed on Oprah’s Book Club list and earned her a spot on Time Magazine’s most influential people list, explores not only her memory recovery process but also her path to healing through disclosure, legal pursuit, relationship strengthening, and rebuilding self-trust.
Overview of The Tell
Can psychedelic therapy help you recover lost memories? Amy Griffin says it can, detailing how it helped her unlock repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. In the book The Tell, Griffin explains how a therapy session assisted with the psychedelic drug MDMA brought this long-buried trauma to the surface, setting her on a path toward healing. She also explores the negative impacts of patriarchal Texan culture, the pitfalls of perfectionism, and the road to healing from abuse.
Griffin is a venture capitalist who founded G9 Ventures, the investment firm that helps get early-stage startups off the ground. Her firm has supported the growth of several notable female-founded brands, including actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s beauty and wellness business Goop, actress Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine, and the dating app Bumble. Griffin’s memoir was met with critical acclaim when it was published in 2025, immediately landing on Oprah’s Book Club list. The Tell also landed Griffin on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2025.
In our guide to The Tell, we explore Griffin’s memoir in four parts:
- Part 1: Becoming Amy Griffin explains how Griffin’s growing up turned her into a powerhouse who had it all—fitness, family, and a successful career. It also explores the dark side of Griffin’s path to success, which haunted her as an adult.
- Part 2: Unraveling the Abuse details Griffin’s experiences with psychedelic therapy—the memories it uncovered and the impact remembering had on her.
- Part 3: Griffin’s Healing Journey describes the four steps Griffin took to process her trauma and reclaim her life—telling her story, pursuing legal justice, strengthening her relationships, and developing self-trust.
- Part 4: An Unanswered Question examines the mystery Griffin raises but can’t resolve—whether her abuser ever victimized anyone else.
Our commentary provides additional context about childhood sexual abuse and psychedelic therapy. It also explores the roots of perfectionism, the importance of grit, and advice for healing from abuse or supporting others’ healing.
Part 1: Becoming Amy Griffin
Griffin begins by describing the forces that turned her into a healthy, happy, successful adult. But she explains that these forces had a dark side, too: Despite attaining all these appearances of success, she felt haunted by something she couldn’t name. In this section, we’ll explore the positive aspects of her journey as well as her silent struggles.
How Griffin Became a Powerhouse
Griffin writes that from the outside—and as far as she could remember—her childhood seemed idyllic. She grew up in the small town of Amarillo, Texas, where her parents ran a convenience store empire. They had high expectations for her—everyone in their community knew who she was, and she had to represent her family and their business well. So, she was motivated to excel at everything she did. Her parents supported this by modeling strength and a relentless work ethic, by encouraging her to be kind, and by praising her leadership skills.
As a result, Griffin says, she became an overachiever. She was a star student and popular among both her classmates and her teachers. She also excelled at athletics; she took up running around age 12 and participated in several sports, including volleyball. Her efforts didn’t go unnoticed—her teachers, coaches, and family praised her for her abilities, and she won a leadership award in the eighth grade.
Griffin explains that drive to achieve continued to serve her well as a young adult. She received a full scholarship to the University of Virginia, where she played on the volleyball team and studied English. After college, she moved to New York City, where she worked at prestigious publication companies, became a marathon runner, and met her husband, John. They had four children, and she devoted herself entirely to becoming the best mother she could be. She raised her children as a stay-at-home mom for nearly a decade before starting an investment firm dedicated to empowering women in business.
Griffin’s Silent Struggles
Although Griffin’s drive to achieve helped her become successful, she explains that it also had a dark side—perfectionism—and that her success and happiness were limited by patriarchal culture. Let’s explore both of these struggles now.
Struggles with Perfectionism
Griffin writes that she overachieved because she felt she had to be perfect to earn others’ love. The praise she received for her talents and accomplishments made her associate her self-worth with her achievements. Then, anytime she didn’t receive praise, she took it hard. To illustrate, she writes about the moment when she learned she wouldn’t be crowned homecoming queen—she felt this proved there was something inherently wrong with her, despite her popularity and academic success.
Griffin’s perfectionism led her to push herself too hard. She overworked at everything she did, including running, which caused her to fall sick and suffer serious injuries often. But, she says, she felt like she couldn’t rest—not only because she had to keep performing in order to earn others’ approval, but also because rest was deeply uncomfortable for her. When she found herself having a quiet or relaxed moment, her underlying anxiety would flare up, compelling her to stay busy.
Griffin explains that her anxiety stemmed from a need to feel in control. It didn’t just crop up when life slowed down; it also caught her by surprise when she was feeling vulnerable. For example, she once had a panic attack during a painful dental procedure because the dentist ignored her protests and made her continue to sit through it, which left her feeling powerless. Later, Griffin would learn that such reactions to vulnerable situations are telltale signs of childhood sexual abuse, which we’ll explore in Part 2.
Struggles With Patriarchy
Perfectionism wasn’t the only thing plaguing Griffin—she was also held back by patriarchy. She first became aware of this as a child. Southern culture, she explains, dictated rigid gender roles subordinating women, which she felt limited her potential. To illustrate, she describes how she ran for student council president in middle school and lost to a boy even though she was better suited for the role.
The South’s patriarchal norms also influenced the way Griffin thought about sex and relationships. She explains that she was taught to value and protect her sexual purity; her parents and church leaders represented virginity as something a man would take away from her one day. This taught her to think of her sexuality as a possession to be guarded rather than a matter of personal choice. At the same time, her culture emphasized the importance of being desirable as a woman: She needed a man to be attracted to her, and to choose her as his wife, in order to prove her value.
Together, these norms made Griffin think of her sexual identity in terms of passivity and shame, rather than agency, self-expression, and joy. She explains that this led her to misinterpret her first adult sexual experiences. The first time she had sex, in college, she asked her partner to stop, but he continued anyway. The experience left her feeling upset and ashamed, but she didn’t understand that it counted as rape. She continued to date and have sex with him, and after they broke up, she remained friendly with him for years.
Part 2: Unraveling the Abuse
Even though Griffin had achieved great success, her silent struggles left her feeling haunted. She knew she had a problem, but she didn’t know what it was—until psychedelic therapy helped her identify it. In this section, we’ll explore how her memories of childhood sexual abuse surfaced, what those memories revealed, and the impact that remembering had on her.
Psychedelic Therapy
Griffin explains that her upbringing discouraged drug use, but her husband opened her eyes to the benefits of psychedelics. Under the guidance of a trained facilitator, he’d been using a pure, safe form of the drug MDMA (commonly known as its street-drug equivalent, ecstasy). It had helped him understand his past better and become more emotionally open. He asked Griffin to meet with his facilitator to learn more about his experiences and how psychedelic therapy works.
During this meeting, the facilitator explained that MDMA helps a patient access deeply buried thoughts, emotions, and memories and meet them with a sense of self-compassion. This allows the patient to process those experiences without feeling overwhelmed in the moment. The facilitator also explained that when working with a patient, she would offer support if needed, but wouldn’t direct or influence their experience. Instead, she’d allow their experience to unfold naturally, and she’d help them reflect on what they’d learned once it was over.
Griffin scheduled a session, hoping it would help her understand what was haunting her so she could move past it. It was at this first session that she remembered the sexual abuse she experienced in middle school at the hands of a trusted teacher—Mr. Mason.
Griffin’s Memories
Griffin had clear memories of sexual abuse during her first and subsequent psychedelic therapy sessions. But, she explains, these memories came to her not only under the influence of MDMA, but also as she went about her daily life. She could remember the specific sexual acts Mason perpetrated, the conversations that unfolded during these instances of abuse, threats of violence he made to deter her from reporting the abuse, and details about the locations where they occurred and what she and her abuser were wearing. The fact that she could remember all of these details confirmed for Griffin that the memories were real; they weren’t just hallucinations brought on by the MDMA she had taken.
Griffin says that once these memories started cropping up, she decided to see a therapist who could help her process them (the facilitator who’d guided her MDMA use wasn’t a trained therapist). Her therapist characterized her memories as flashbacks—vivid, involuntary recollections of traumatic events that had been stored in her mind but never fully processed.
Griffin writes that her therapist also explained why she hadn’t remembered the abuse before. Memory is a three-stage process; it involves encoding, storage, and recall. In the encoding stage, the brain takes in information and converts it for storage. The brain doesn’t convert everything—it only stores important information. This includes information about traumatic events, like someone’s experiences of childhood sexual abuse, which tend to be stored vividly and with strong emotional associations.
Sometimes, even though these memories are vividly stored, they can remain inaccessible to conscious awareness for years. In such cases, a person may only recall these memories when something in the present, like an emotion, reminds them of the past—and when the brain knows that it’s safe to remember.
To explain why she hadn’t recalled her memories before her MDMA session, Griffin explains that at the time, she met both of these criteria: Her mind recognized links to the past, and she felt safe. The anxiety she felt when starting the session mirrored the anxiety she felt when she was being abused. Additionally, her therapist noted, Griffin’s daughters were around the same age she’d been during the abuse; observing them every day likely reminded her of her own experiences as a preteen. Then, being in the company of someone she trusted to help her—the facilitator—made her feel safe, which allowed her brain to open its floodgates and release those memories.
Griffin says her therapist also told her why she should believe her memories were true. The MDMA may also have helped her feel safe, since it stimulates the release of oxytocin—a brain chemical that promotes emotional openness. The therapist assured Griffin that the MDMA didn’t make her hallucinate, explaining that MDMA doesn’t produce hallucinations. Instead, it promotes self-awareness and compassion—the qualities she needed in order to face her memories.
Notably, Griffin maintains that it wasn’t the MDMA itself that brought on her memories. MDMA takes about 30 minutes to kick in, but her first memory occurred only five minutes into the session. She believes her willingness to confront her memories, and safety she felt under the guidance of the facilitator, allowed them to surface.
The Impact of Remembering
Griffin writes that after she began to remember the abuse, it became the only thing she could think about. New memories revealed themselves often, and they were always devastating. She felt a mix of overwhelming emotions about the abuse, including:
- Anger that no one noticed the abuse or stopped it from happening
- Fear that her children would be victimized
- Compassion for her child self’s suffering
- Fear that no one would believe her, since she’d never told anyone and hadn’t even been able to remember the abuse until she started psychedelic therapy
Processing her memories and emotions required a lot of time and energy. To help the processing along, Griffin’s husband (to whom she revealed the abuse immediately after her first session) recommended that she start journaling. She explains that she kept detailed records of her memories and the events that followed her remembering (like the criminal investigation we’ll explore in Part 3). This not only helped her make sense of her experiences but also provided her with a feeling of certainty—a way to anchor herself when she doubted her own recollections, feared she was imagining things, or worried others wouldn’t believe her. By documenting everything as it unfolded, she built tangible proof of her own story.
Because she was so preoccupied with her abuse, Griffin explains, she felt incapable of participating in normal, everyday activities. She couldn’t imagine having a mundane conversation with someone about ordinary topics while carrying the weight of such devastating revelations—and she was too exhausted to do so anyway. As a result, she withdrew from social events and daily responsibilities, and her husband supported her by taking on a larger share of childcare and household tasks.
Part 3: Griffin’s Healing Journey
Being consumed by her memories left her feeling isolated and overwhelmed, and Griffin didn’t want things to stay that way. She thought of herself as a survivor, not a victim, and was eager to move forward with her life.
In this section, we’ll explore the four measures she took to heal and reclaim her sense of wholeness and agency: telling her story, pursuing legal justice, strengthening her relationships, and learning to trust herself.
Telling Her Story
The first step Griffin took toward healing was sharing her story with others. She explains that she started doing this as soon as she remembered the abuse. Initially, she only shared it with the facilitator, her therapist, and her husband. The facilitator and therapist cautioned her against sharing too widely or too quickly, but she felt compelled to tell others, too.
Griffin explains that telling her story was the only way to overcome the sense of fear and shame her abuser had used to control her. Mason had threatened her with violence if she spoke up and told her no one would believe her if she did, and these warnings had embedded themselves so deeply in her mind that she hadn’t been able to be honest with even herself about the abuse. Now she was ready to break her silence. So, she told her closest friends, who put her in contact with other victims of abuse she could relate to. She also told her childhood volleyball coach, who’d been friendly with Mason. The coach expressed regret for not recognizing the abuse—she felt she should have recognized it since she’d been abused as a child, too.
These first “tellings” were good practice; the other steps Griffin took toward healing, which we’ll describe next, required her to tell her story repeatedly. To pursue legal justice, she had to recount the abuse and how she’d recovered memories of it to lawyers and police. Strengthening her relationships with her family also required sharing her experiences, and reconnecting with herself meant articulating the abuse so she could integrate it into the story of her life. Writing The Tell was the culmination of Griffin’s long journey of disclosure—she explains that she wrote the book to give voice to her experiences while helping others who have faced similar trauma.
Pursuing Legal Justice
Griffin explains that sharing her story was a good first step, but it didn’t satisfy her need for justice. She felt she couldn’t heal without holding Mason accountable for the harm he’d inflicted on her, and she wanted to set a good example for her children, too—she wanted them to know that once she recognized something was wrong, she did all she could to make things right.
Griffin’s drive for justice led her to pursue legal action against Mason. She met with a New York lawyer who helped her get started. The lawyer’s team launched an investigation into Mason’s past; to gather evidence to support Griffin’s case, they interviewed people who might have known about his behavior, witnessed signs of abuse, or been abused themselves. Some interviewees remembered Mason fondly, but others remembered him as a creep. They could provide examples of behavior that they thought inappropriate, but nothing they reported was clearly criminal or legally actionable. No one reported having been abused by Mason.
Griffin says her lawyer advised her to hire a criminal lawyer based in Texas. She told Griffin that filing a civil suit against Mason might backfire—he could countersue for defamation—and that someone with knowledge of Texas law would be better able to represent her in court. Griffin’s father recommended a lawyer he knew, a defense attorney named Duke, who continued the investigation.
Griffin writes that Duke mishandled her case. She felt that he infantilized her and spoke condescendingly, that he made slow progress, and that he was frequently hard to get in contact with. However, she felt some hope when Duke connected her with a detective at the Amarillo District Attorney’s office. The detective wanted to hear her story so he could investigate the case, and when they spoke, he told her he believed her. He said that her account of the abuse was convincing, and he hoped to interview Mason soon after they spoke.
However, Griffin’s pursuit of legal justice ultimately was a dead end. She explains that a few days after interviewing her, the detective called to tell her the statute of limitations had run out on her case: Because too much time had elapsed since the abuse, Griffin couldn’t press charges. She was heartbroken, but eventually discovered that legal justice wasn’t necessary for healing—strengthening her family relationships would prove more effective.
Strengthening Relationships
Though Griffin had shared her story with a variety of people at this point, she hadn’t yet told many of her family members. However, her pursuit of legal justice required her to talk to some of them about it. She had to tell her father about it so that he could recommend a lawyer, and telling her father required her to tell her mother and sister, too. Griffin says she was reluctant to share her story with them because she feared doing so would hurt them. It did, in fact, hurt them—they took the news personally, blamed themselves for the abuse, and expressed strong emotions that Griffin felt responsible for managing. But they also believed her, which she found relieving, and offered to support her however they could.
Griffin also decided to tell her three oldest children about her experiences (but not her fourth child, who she felt was too young to understand or cope with such a distressing topic). She explains that her children had noticed something was going on with her; they sensed that she was anxious and distant, and they expressed that they struggled to connect with her. This motivated Griffin to tell them she’d been abused—by telling them, she could close the emotional gap that was separating them. Telling them about the abuse also opened the door to broader conversations about consent, trust, and safety, which she hoped would help protect her children from suffering the abuse she’d endured.
Although telling her family about the abuse was difficult, it strengthened her relationships. Griffin’s therapist helped her understand why: Being abused taught her that she couldn’t be vulnerable. To protect herself, she needed to pretend that she was always OK, which fed into her perfectionism—she felt she had to appear flawless and in control, even when she was hurting inside. Opening up about the abuse allowed her to let go of that coping mechanism and embrace vulnerability. That vulnerability—the freedom to be herself and to trust others to love her even if her life wasn’t perfect—helped her form deeper, more authentic connections with her family.
Developing Self-Trust
Griffin says the final step in her healing journey was developing self-trust. She explains that the abuse she endured taught her not to trust herself. To survive the abuse, she’d had to remain polite and obedient, suppressing her discomfort and overriding her instincts. To overcome this, Griffin says, she had to learn to trust her body. She stopped pushing herself so hard, a pattern that, as we’ve discussed, had made her more susceptible to illness and injury. She gave up running and learned to embrace rest, and she got better at setting boundaries—for example, she stopped engaging with a man who’d raped her in college but with whom she’d since kept in contact.
Griffin writes that she also had to learn to trust her memory. The fact that her memories had only emerged after psychedelic therapy did make her question them to some extent; as each memory unfolded, she felt strongly that they reflected reality, but in the intervening moments, doubt sometimes crept in. She assuaged her doubts by reminding herself that the memories were vivid, consistent, and detailed, and that the emotions they stirred were real. She also revisited the school where Mason taught her. There, she noted that although the rooms where the abuse occurred had been remodeled, they felt eerily familiar, which affirmed that her memories were authentic.
Finally, Griffin learned to trust in her strengths. Mason had used her strengths against her—he had praised her leadership skills, her kindness, and other positive traits to gain her trust, and he used this to manipulate her. To heal, Griffin needed to reclaim these strengths for herself. She continually reminded herself that these traits made her valuable, which was an effective antidote to the shame that being abused made her feel.
Part 4: An Unanswered Question
Griffin’s healing left her in a happier, more grounded place, but one major question still loomed over her: Did Mason abuse anyone else? She hoped not, but she suspected he had, and she knew that finding other victims would prove that the abuse she remembered really happened. She reached out to several childhood classmates with the hope that they’d reveal their own accounts of abuse, including a woman she calls Claudia.
Though they weren’t close friends, Griffin had once loaned Claudia a dress for a dance. She wondered if she had done this because, on some level, she knew that Mason was also abusing Claudia. So, she met with Claudia to discuss her experiences and asked if she’d been abused, too. But, Griffin explains, Claudia maintained that she’d never been abused and said she was sorry she couldn’t help Griffin more.
Shortly after their meeting, Griffin received a postcard in the mail. The postcard implied that someone she had spoken to had also been affected by Mason’s abuse but wasn’t ready to come forward. Griffin assumed the postcard came from Claudia, but Claudia denied it. Griffin never found out who sent it—but, she writes, it suggests that Mason did have other victims, just as she suspected.
Exercise: Learn to Trust Yourself Again
Griffin writes that part of her healing process was learning to trust her instincts after spending so many years suppressing her thoughts, feelings, and memories. In this exercise, examine how past trauma, challenges, or difficulties may have made you doubt yourself, and think about how you might learn to trust your instincts again.
- Think about a difficult experience you’ve dealt with, whether it was abuse to the level Griffin faced or something less violent but that still made you struggle—social, financial, or familial problems, for example. How did you cope with or respond to this struggle?
- What doubts about yourself did that experience plant in your mind?
- What strengths of your personality helped you get through the experience? Or, if the challenge is still ongoing, what strengths can you lean on to help you get through it?
- How might you reevaluate the self-doubts this experience created? How can you reframe those insecurities? How might you use your personal strengths to see them in a new light?
