Someone posted a link to a Briere chapter a while back (
http://johnbriere.com/stm.htm), and I've been slowly trying to digest it. There is a lot there. When I brought it up to my T, she said that it's one of her favorite works, that she finds his work to be very humane.
Interestingly, despite the fact that I read this piece and really liked it, it also has caused problems for me with T. Now I feel like she's judging me from a clincial perspective. When she asks me things, I respond "Well, Briere and you would say..." It's a mess.
Definitely in an I-hate-therapy-and-it's-a-waste-of-my-time place right now. But trying not to be rash. Maybe it's a period of transition and processing.
Anyway, here are some parts I really liked:
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"Because early neglect and/or abuse may have led to the development of an ambivalent or avoidant attachment pattern, the client is, in some sense, being asked to go against lifelong learning and become dangerously vulnerable to a powerful relational figure. That he or she is willing to do so at all in such cases is testament to the investment and bravery that many abuse survivors bring to therapy."
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Yeah, it's definitely going against every impulse I have to keep going back and telling her more things, rather than walking away and never speaking to her again. Very difficult.
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[b]ecause early maltreatment lead to the formation of pre-verbal relational schemata, merely (verbally) insisting to a client that she is good, or safe, or entitled to positive treatment will rarely be entirely effective....In other words, much of distorted relational schemas are, by definition, non-verbal; as a result, their remediation must also be nonverbal -- the clinician must show, not merely tell.
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That makes sense to me. Why I'm always looking for proof in the way she acts.
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[T]he self-trauma model views the therapeutic relationship as directly and specifically curative....Among other things, the therapeutic relationship is a powerful source of interpersonal triggers...The therapeutic relationship, however, also is a powerful source of disparity and resolution -- once triggered and activated by relational stimuli, cognitive-emotional responses can be examined and processed in the context of safety, soothing, and support, potentially leading to clinical improvement, inlcuding reduced abuse-specific difficulties in current and future relationships.
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In fact, as is addressed below, the psychodynamic notion of transference may be reconceptualized as the cued activation of implicit, relational memories in the context of therapy.
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This discussion was huge to me, explained what the theoretical purpose of the therapy relationship was supposed to be. Before I was just doing it, blindly; now I have an idea of what it's supposed to accomplish and how.
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It might appear that, in the absence of explicit memory, early childhood maltreatment would have to go unprocessed. However, because such memory material is often triggered by reminiscent -- often relational -- stimuli, as described above, therapists are frequently able to work with the manifestations of childhood maltreatment that are activated in the therapy session.
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Someone asked about this in another thread. Pretty interesting.
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Because the survivor of interpersonal violence, maltreatment, or exploitation tends to perceive danger in interpersonal situations, the absence of danger in the session must be experienced directly, not just promised....In this regard, the most powerful dispartiy for many clients may be to expect hatefulness or disregard from their therapists and to get, instead, loving attention.
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Unlearning is hard and takes time. I often go in expecting my T will want to argue with me about something and am ready to fight back. And then she doesn't, she takes a different, more gentle approach. It's always unexpected to me.
There's a lot more there. Thanks to whoever posted this article previously on PC (kim_johnson?) -- it was a big relevation to me to find it.