MDMA Therapy Unlocked 'Horrific' Repressed Memories of Assault. Why Amy Griffin Is Sharing Her Story Now (Exclusive)

For a long time, Amy Griffin could not slow down. The high-powered investor and West Texas native helped boost brands like Spanx, Goop, Bumble and Hello Sunshine, all while raising four kids with her husband in New York.

She was chasing perfection, like many women feel pressured to do, until her body gave her enough signs — "clues," as she puts it — that she was hiding from something. "Why am I running away?" she remembers asking herself. "Why can I not enjoy the life that I've built and be present in it in a way that I would like?"

Griffin, 48, eventually got her answers, which she shares in her inspiring — and at times harrowing — new memoir The Tell (out now from The Dial Press), which has just been announced as the March 2025 pick for Oprah's Book Club.

Once inklings of buried trauma began trickling to the forefront of her mind, Griffin decided to finally face them head-on, giving psychedelic-assisted therapy a shot. John, her husband since 2003 to whom she dedicated her book, had suggested trying the MDMA route.

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"How did I know that this is what I needed to do? Even now I don't really understand it," she writes in The Tell. "I just knew that I had built up walls, and I did not know how to tear them down. I knew that I was tired of running."

After she took the pill (under the supervision of a trusted therapist), repressed memories of being sexually assaulted by a middle school teacher resurfaced. There was no more avoiding her past after that.

"What happened to me was so horrific that I put it in the back of my brain and was never going to tell myself," Griffin tells PEOPLE. "What has been most powerful for me is the decision to go forward and talk about it."

She began writing about it for herself, processing her journey through journal entries. "I wrote on the bathroom floor. I wrote in my closet. Anytime I couldn't express an emotion, I sat down and I wrote," she says. "I wrote because I knew that it would save my life. And it did."

That part was "wildly cathartic," she says. But then she realized the "gift" of sharing her experience, — as well as a play-by-play of her personal process — with other survivors. She wants readers to know that it's not intended to be a one-size-fits-all guidebook, though. Even the psychedelic-assisted therapy component is something she's careful not to prescribe to readers as the best fit for them.

"For me, it was one of the most profound experiences of my life, yet I also want to caution to say that I had no idea how I was going to have to pick up the pieces of my life on the other end of it," says Griffin. "Sometimes things are so difficult in life, there's a reason why you don't want to remember them."

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Beyond the MDMA sessions, Griffin cites a combo of tools that help her cope and make sense of her past trauma and mental health today: deep conversations with loved ones, plus "therapy with a therapist, tapping, dark chocolate, hot baths, long walks, a lot of talking to myself, a lot of music in my ears — it was all those things."

Today, nearly two years after she completed writing The Tell, Griffin is grateful to have remembered her past and faced it head on. "Everything is more vibrant, more honest," the author says. "I would hope my children say I'm a different kind of parent in many ways."

Why had she been running for so long? She admits it was simply "too painful and too scary to really sit in the truth and the honesty," so her subconscious had taken over.

But as she's come to learn, "Secrets, we think they keep us safe, but they don't," she says. "The secrets are actually what keep us stuck." She hopes others in similar situations also find the courage to share their stories with trusted confidants.

"It's not just about what happened to me," she says, of the healing process. "It was more about the telling of it."

The Tell is now available, wherever books are sold.

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.

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