Terr's book Too Scared to Cry is divided into four parts focusing on the following aspects of childhood psychic trauma: emotions, mental work, behavior and treatment and contagion. Within this book she describes several cases that illustrate the troubling problem of children's statements and behaviors that are based in factitious traumatic events. Within this book she details the results of her review of twenty pre-schoolers, and concludes that trauma suffered before the age of three years old was rarely able to be fully described verbally, instead events were reenacted behaviorally. Lastly, Terr notes the distinction between a single, sudden traumatic event as being clearly held in a child's mind and subsequently accessible to verbal remembering, versus repetitive or prolonged trauma that severely compromises accurate verbal recall.