Re: Treating Trauma

• Treating trauma by Pete Gambino, 5/8/97
  
  

Pete,

In Classical Adlerian treatment of an "incapacity due to trauma", an important factor to consider would be the style of life that was established before the trauma took place. How the individual experiences, digests, and deals with the painful event, is strongly influenced by his preexisting fictional final goal. Knowledge of this mental structure, would offer the therapist a clue regarding the tendency of that client to cooperate with treatment, or exploit the "trauma" as an excuse for avoiding a challenge that would "threaten" the fictional goal.

If the therapist is able to offer deep empathy and understanding that invites the client to share the burden of the remembered experience, a full, cathartic, emotional expression may be elicited. Healing can gradually take place by exploring alternative, imagined scenarios of justice, forgiveness, or other "resolutions" that might provide closure for the client. If the client genuinely wants to overcome the chronic, painful, and disabling recollections, and return to normal functioning, he would need to cooperate with the therapist by intellectually and emotionally accepting one of the co-invented resolutions.

A client who has been exploiting a trauma for attention, sympathy, support, or as an excuse for avoiding responsibility, may resist any therapeutic intervention, and feel a secret victory over that therapist's inability to diminish their continuing anguish.

Some of the best clues to the style of life (that existed prior to the trauma) are usually embedded in the client's earliest childhood recollections. The issue of courage is intimately connected to the vision of the world that is represented in those memories. If a client has a devastating, negative world view, one that would take a heroic degree of courage to survive, we probably would have to alter that client's world view in order to generate a normal level of courage for daily living.

Henry

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