Before I begin this post, I’d like to humbly thank my clients of all genders who showed immeasurable courage by honouring me as their therapist on their journey of survival, recovery, rediscovery, and reclamation. Just one of the many legacies you’ll have left in this world is supporting me as a therapist to better understand the hardship and survival of overcoming such horrific act/s. Your wisdom of trauma, expertise in bravery, and determination to repossess and reclaim your lives will live on in testimony, in this way and in many others, by better supporting me to help others to navigate similar extreme hardship.
Whilst I do not believe anyone can represent the experience of people who have been affected by sexual abuse of any kind, I’ve been advised by survivors that sharing my learnings as a therapist could be helpful to individuals and the community.
A key learning I’ve been supported with from my clients is that people always, always, respond to sexual abuse by endeavouring to prevent or minimise it. They are never passive recipients or consenting participants. This is one of the main processes for supporting a person away from the immobilisation of trauma, towards reclaiming their life and personhood. This is also a key process of Narrative Therapy.
At first, responses go unnoticed or rendered invisible and insignificant. This is because of the dominance of the effects of abuse, which is the actual core of the trauma – it overshadows everything else about the person and the meaningfulness of their life. Therapy involves making way for new experiences of the trauma, such as rediscovering responses to trauma and ascribing them meaning that is founded upon what the person holds dear.
For example, the person may have responded to trauma by mentally detaching to escape the only way they can, put themselves into harm’s way to protect their sibling, cried or struggled to display that they do not consent, or avoided and delayed being with a perpetrator in various ways. At first these responses might seem small to the person. However, these responses are founded on precious personal values and commitments such as love, compassion, protection, justice, protest, resistance, and survival. People can reconnect and create fierce new identities by finding significant meaning in their responses to horrific abuse.
After the client has felt safe enough to share the effects, clients are supported to reinterpret their experience by exploring power/powerlessness and search for other gaps in effects. In time, we discover the power imbalances and multiple responses to trauma including clever initiatives, cherished values, and astounding skills. When these experiences are re/discovered, weaving them can thicken preferred stories of the trauma, and preferred identities.
For instance, a person might move from a place of feeling like a victim, of being immobilised by trauma, towards feeling outraged that as a child they were exploited and subjugated to sexual abuse. Their outrage could be connected to a strong sense of social justice – against abuse and patriarchy, that cannot be read as self-blame and self-rejection, only as self-care and self-acceptance, as connected to significant meaning, and possibly invoking membership to a great cause. Despite the perpetrator having significant power to covertly orchestrate the abuse, the client’s survival stands as testament to their resilience, made up of a plethora of skills and responses they used to protest and protect for what is important to them.
We can continue to thicken and strengthen these preferred experiences by exalting the self-discoveries and realisations, championing new and existing purposes and intentions, honouring the survival skills and strategies, and connecting hopes and dreams to principles and commitments.
What you’ve read above are my key learnings from clients, coupled with key components of Narrative Therapy. This is just one way of working with people who have survived sexual abuse. There are many other ways of working that are highly beneficial, such as sensorimotor psychotherapy and EMDR. Whatever the approach, the fundamental ingredients to working with trauma is the therapist supporting clients’ to feel safe, dignified, respected, and empowered to be heard and have choices in the therapeutic relationship. This can only be learned by positioning the client as the expert in their own life, and collaborating to ensure the client has power and agency in the therapeutic relationship.
Further, as a man working with womxn who have survived gender-based abuse, clients have found it helpful discussing our gendered differences. We talk about things like male practitioner accountability and male privilege, what does it say about the quality of the relationship for the client being able to say ‘no’ to a male practitioner, concepts of safety and collaboration, and what it’s like coming to see a practitioner who doesn’t have an experience of being a woman or of sexism.
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