An important and useful idea described in the self-trauma model is the concept of the “therapeutic window.” Briere (2002) describes this as the psychological area that has the upper limit of clients feeling overwhelmed by exposure to abuse-related material and the lower limit of excessive avoidance of traumatic material. The therapist strives to work within the area demarcated by the therapeutic window so that sessions are tolerable in intensity. At the upper limit of the therapeutic window, the experience is likely to become an “insurmountable affective task” (p. 185). On the other hand, interventions that are not psychologically demanding can result in minimal psychological growth or “a surmountable affective task” (p. 185). Therapists constantly monitor the amount of abuse-related distress that clients can tolerate, with the aim of balancing exploration and consolidation of traumatic material.

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:BRS4ijhhfP0J:www.sagepub.com/upm-data/14228_Chapter3.pdf+"therapeutic+window"psychotherapy+definition+trauma&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=au&client=firefox-a

i've been posting on message boards since about... the end of 2002. boards a little like these... i struggled with community mental health services back home for a long time trying to get a clinician who would work with me. didn't really happen. or if i did get to work with someone they would only be around for 3-6 months and then they would move on.

a board (a little like this one) became my therapy. it didn't constitute therapy in the sense that psychotherapy is a trade-marked term, but the board was my therapy at any rate. so... people would post to support me and to call me on my crap and to question me... and i'd get a great deal out of that process. and i'd post similarly to them, of course.

here is a little different. i think it is fair to say that people here are... a little more fragile? i always did need to be careful about posting to call people and / or question. here... i need to be even more so. maybe its not appreciated here... maybe it is... i think the way you go about it counts for a whole heap.

i've just been... missing past times. i've been... triggered by past feelings of being misheard / misunderstood / ignored. i've been... longing for times past when i feel connected (idealised in hindshight no doubt). the theraputic window is... about framing the message in a way that the message is theraputic and not overwhelming or 'too slow'. probably fairly abstract still... poems help sometimes precisely because of their ambiguity...