Trauma and Recovery by Judith L. Herman

Author:Judith L. Herman [Herman, Judith L.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780465004058
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2015-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

COMPLETING THE FIRST STAGE

Because the tasks of the first stage of recovery are arduous and demanding, patient and therapist alike frequently try to bypass them. It is often tempting to overlook the requirements of safety and to rush headlong into the later stages of therapeutic work. Though the single most common therapeutic error is avoidance of the traumatic material, probably the second most common error is premature or precipitate engagement in exploratory work, without sufficient attention to the tasks of establishing safety and securing a therapeutic alliance.

Patients at times insist upon plunging into graphic, detailed descriptions of their traumatic experiences, in the belief that simply pouring out the story will solve all their problems. At the root of this belief is the fantasy of a violent cathartic cure which will get rid of the trauma once and for all. The patient may imagine a kind of sadomasochistic orgy, in which she will scream, cry, vomit, bleed, die, and be reborn cleansed of the trauma. The therapist’s role in this reenactment comes uncomfortably close to that of the perpetrator, for she is invited to rescue the patient by inflicting pain. The patient’s desire for this kind of quick and magical cure is fueled by images of early, cathartic treatments of traumatic syndromes which by now pervade popular culture, as well as by the much older religious metaphor of exorcism. The case of Kevin, a 35-year-old divorced man with a long history of alcoholism, illustrates the error of premature uncovering work:

Kevin stopped drinking after he nearly died from medical complications of his alcoholism. Newly sober, he began to be tormented by flashback memories of severe, early childhood abuse. He sought psychotherapy to “get to the bottom” of his problem. He felt that the traumatic memories were the cause of his drinking and that he would never crave alcohol again if he could just “get it all out of my system.” He refused to participate in a formal alcoholism program and was not attending Alcoholics Anonymous. He saw these programs as a “crutch” for weak-willed, dependent people and felt that he had no need for such support.

The therapist agreed to focus on Kevin’s childhood history. In the psychotherapy sessions Kevin poured out his memories in gruesome detail. His nightmares and flashbacks worsened, and he began to make more and more emergency phone calls between sessions. In the meantime, his attendance at regularly scheduled therapy sessions became erratic. During some of the phone calls Kevin sounded drunk, but he adamantly denied that he had resumed drinking. The therapist realized her error only when Kevin arrived at a session with alcohol on his breath.

In this case the therapist, who was unsophisticated in matters of substance abuse, paid insufficient attention to the task of establishing sobriety. She accepted the patient’s argument that he had no need of social support, thus ignoring one of the basic components of safety. She also failed to recognize that exploring traumatic memories in depth was likely to stimulate more intrusive symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and therefore to jeopardize the patient’s fragile sobriety.

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