Rescuing the inner children: Gentle trauma work for chronic sexual abuse, Wellington

Many clients who have suffered chronic early sexual violence are often emotionally flooded by standard trauma exposure, thus this otherwise highly validated technique becomes problematic in their treatment. This has led to an emphasis on stabilizing interventions and resource activation with these clients. While this often leads to significant improvement, it still leaves the client vulnerable to the trauma and associated triggers, which can often be the cause of retraumatization. This results in a classic dilemma in all trauma therapies: stabilizing vs. confronting. In order to not cause more harm (in line with the old dictum of the Hippocratic Oath: “Primum non nocere” – rst, cause no harm”) many therapists do not work on the traumatic memories, thereby forgoing a powerful tool on the path towards healing.

This workshop aims to present a method for working on the trauma in a gentle manner, one that will reduce the risk of emotional overstimulation: “Rescuing the Inner Children”. Distinctive features are an imaginative trauma therapy that is based on an ego-states understanding of trauma and dissociative states typical for early sexual traumata. The early sexual abuse is conceptualized as traumatized inner child states, which are targeted in the treatment by imaginatively rescuing these “children”. This helps to overcome the structural dissociation and leads to deeper trauma processing and lasting integration of trauma states into more stable personality functioning.

Trained in Germany as a psychotherapist and having worked many years in inpatient units with server and chronic ill clients, I have come to value a psychodynamic understanding of client pathology (Relational Psychoanalysis, Transference Focused Psychotherapy and Mentalizaton Based Therapy) in an effort to find ways that would work to reduce the suffering of clients I met. I have specialized over the years in the treatment of personality disorder (here specifically narcissistic personality disorder), recurrent and chronic psychiatry disorders and complex trauma. I have immigrated to NZ in Oct 2015 have worked for the adult mental health community team in Napier (HBDHB), and am now full-time in private practice.

Fee