Incest Therapy - Retraumatization Or Flight Over The Abyss

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

It is not so often that such a patient appears on the doorstep of our office. We experience him as too strange and radiating an incomprehensible danger, it is quite understandable if we have a justified desire to quickly redirect him to a "narrower specialist". This is often a psychotic with fluctuating boundaries. But I would like to believe that there are masters of their craft among us who are able to discern a soul distorted by early sexual use behind all external manifestations, an adult body with a small child frozen in horror inside.

It is with this "discernment" or TRUST that the construction of psychoanalytic relations, complex, full of undercurrents and surprises, begins. It is the starting point of the journey from the world of psychotic functioning to the state of relatively healthy neurotic, a road filled with almost unbearable pain and fear, leading to frenzy.

And only the therapist's personality, his integrity, strength and stability of his function of containing the client's anxieties allows not to lose faith and continue to move towards the goal, gaining experience of relationships built on respect, correctness, recognition and strengthening of personal boundaries.

If you wish, you can find enough material that the therapy of incestuous trauma in most cases is associated with the reconstruction of these most unpleasant events so that they eventually cease to serve as material for incessant acting out. Whether this is a simple matter can be judged by the nature of the injury itself.

Apparently, I will not surprise anyone by mentioning that a very important mechanism of reconstruction, and indeed of all therapy as a whole, is the phenomenon of transfer - countertransfer, but in simple terms, it’s like calling for an encore the very drama of the client’s family relations, only here are both main roles, both the aggressor and the victim, will have to be fulfilled by the client and the therapist. Such is not a simple production, designed for two actors who are also spectators at the same time. Yes, not every Mkhatov pupil can do this.

In fact, each client is faced with a barrage of contradictions in therapy. Before him is a psychotherapist, an unfamiliar person, initially emotionally pure. He does not offend, does not attack the borders, in general, plays the role of a fairly good mother. And the trauma still requires its own, the client, like a squirrel in a wheel, continues to act out seductive behavior, aggression, frozenness, persistent silence, etc. What happens? If you think well and observe, we can assume that the person sitting opposite is not at all aware of the existence of love and affection that is not tinged with sexual tones, and this is the first thing. Secondly, as a toddler, he too often faced a denial of tenderness and care, as such, and all the little ones relying and vital. And he received in return a process of violating boundaries, whether it was an emotional invasion or supplemented by physical penetration.

Dear colleagues, is the process of psychoanalytic influence different in many ways? Emotional closeness on the face, physical, of course, is not and cannot be, only now does the client's brain "see" the grandiose difference between the events of the past discussed at the session and the process of interaction between the client and the therapist taking place here and now? In my opinion, not very much.

Thus, it seems that the reconstruction of traumatic events in therapy always borders on, or is directly related to, retraumatization. But without this it is impossible. To let go of pain, you have to relive it again, but this time in a completely different environment, in a safe therapeutic space, which helps the client leave the world of trauma.

A little about flying, flying over the abyss. One 15-year-old girl with the beautiful name Anastasia, while reconstructing the events of sexual use in therapy, gave a very colorful example: “It seems to me that when I tell you about my mother and I, I am flying over the abyss. And I don’t fall, you are holding me the fact that you believe me and that you are not afraid of listening to my story. The worst thing about this is only that if you do something wrong and I understand it, I will begin to fall uncontrollably, this is an endless fall, they do not return from there.

Then I thought: "God, what a responsibility", but a little later I realized that there is nothing easier than being yourself, trusting the client, realizing that whatever the story may be, this is his reality. And it is easy not to take part in their acting out, if you always remember that our goal is reconstruction with minimal retraumatization, that the slightest hint of repetition is the irrevocable fall of both into the abyss.