Countertransference And The Treatment Of Trauma

Understanding strong countertransference reactions can be the hardest part of practice for many mental health professionals - particularly with patients who have experienced great trauma. This book aimd to shows mental health practitioners how they can manage their countertransference reactions and use them as a force for healing patients suffering from trauma.

This volume is the first book in the field of traumatic stress studies to systematically examine the unique role of countertransference processes in psychotherapy outcome. Emphasizing the need for carefully deliberated action, this volume offers vital new insights into the victim-healer relationship and presents detailed techniques to promote awareness of affective reactions for anyone working with sufferers of PTSD and its comorbid conditions such as anxiety, depression, and substance abuse.

This book explores the role and experience of the therapist in the therapeutic relationship by examining countertransference (the therapist's response to the client) and vicarious traumatization (the therapist's response to the stories of abuse told by client after client). The authors address specific issues that arise in treatment of incest survivors.

Management of Countertransference with Borderline Patients is an open and detailed discussion of the emotional reactions that clinicians experience when treating borderline patients. This book provides a systematic approach to managing countertransference that legitimizes the therapist's reactions and shows ways to use them therapeutically with the patient.

Empathy in the Treatment of Trauma and PTSD examines how professionals are psychologically impacted by their work with trauma clients. A national research study provides empirical evidence, documenting the struggle for professionals to maintain therapeutic equilibrium and empathic attunement with their trauma clients. Among the many important findings of this study, all participants reported being emotionally and psychologically affected by the work, often quite profoundly leading to changes in worldview, beliefs about the nature of humankind and the meaning of life. John P. Wilson and Rhiannon Thomas set out to understand how to heal those who experience empathic strain in the course of their professional specialization. The data included in the book allows for the development of conceptual dynamic models of effective management of empathic strain, which may cause vicarious traumatization, burnout and serious countertransference processes.

Treating traumatized patients takes its toll on the treating clinician, giving rise over time to what Richard B. Gartner terms countertrauma in the psychoanalyst or therapist. Paradoxically, a clinician may also be imbued with a sense of optimism, or counterresilience, after learning how often the human spirit can triumph over heartbreakingly tragic experiences. Trauma and Countertrauma, Resilience and Counterresilience brings together a distinguished group of seasoned clinicians, both trauma specialists and psychoanalysts. Their personal reflections show what clinicians all too rarely dare to reveal: their personal traumatic material. They then discuss how they develop models for acknowledging, articulating, and synthesizing the countertrauma that arises from long-term exposure to patients’ often-harrowing trauma. Writing openly, using viscerally affecting language, the contributors to this exceptional collection share subjective and sometimes intimate material, shedding light on the inner lives of people who work to heal the wounds of psychic trauma. By the same token, many of these clinicians describe how working intimately with traumatized individuals can affect the listener positively, recounting how patients’ resilience evokes counterresilience in the therapist, allowing the clinician to benefit from ongoing contact with patients who deal bravely with horrific adversity. Paradoxically, a clinician may be imbued with a sense of optimism after learning how often the human spirit can triumph over heartbreakingly tragic experiences. Trauma and Countertrauma, Resilience and Counterresilience will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, and trauma experts, offering a valuable resource to those beginning their careers in mental health work, to teachers and supervisors of trauma therapists, to experienced clinicians struggling with burnout, and to anyone who wants to understand the psychotherapeutic process or indeed the human condition.

Countertransference was believed at one time to consist of the subjective reactions of the therapist whose own unresolved conflicts had been reactivated by the patient's transference. More recently, however, it has been recast to include the totality of the therapist's attitudes, fantasies, and emotional reactions to the patient. While this important topic has received increased attention in the mental health literature in recent years, little attention has been paid to countertransference encountered in child and adolescent psychotherapy. This book focuses on countertransference in the psychotherapy of children and adolescents in detail. It offers the child and adolescent therapist an invaluable opportunity to explore countertransference in substantial depth and in a variety of clinical encounters across the wide spectrum of child and adolescent psychopathology. Perhaps most importantly, it normalizes the topic of transference in the psycho-therapy of children and adolescents and, in so doing, highlights the clinician's subjective experience as central to the process of psychotherapy.

This book presents a classic examination of transference phenomena and focuses on the development of psychoanalytic technique and theory. It addresses a perceived gap between psychoanalytic knowledge and its capacity to effect psychological transformation in a patient.