---

Jeremy Woodcock: A systemic approach to trauma

"By its very nature, trauma can overwhelm the therapist. Aspects of the therapeutic work will almost inevitably involve having to think about the unthinkable. Because of this, consultation and supervision are very important components of the work in so far as they enable the therapist to bring into mind things that are difficult for them to contain on their own".

---

Chip Chimera: Show me a story - healing the trauma of sexual abuse and family separation

"This is the story of a young adolescent who from the age of four carried the responsibility and guilt for her own sexual abuse and, in her eyes more importantly, for the break-up of the family. The mother and daughter were able to work therapeutically together to begin to heal the damage. The therapeutic spiral model, applied to facilitated contact, enabled their journey."

Top

---

David Denborough: Looking beyond the prison

"When writing about prisons there is so much more to describe than the solitude, the violence and the sorrow. Even in the most oppressive of prison regimes, there are dreams of freedom to be found. Those inside do not simply experience trauma, they also plot, laugh, love and work hard at maintaining their sanity and hopes for the future."

---

Sue Robinson: Respect and trauma

"When people have been traumatised, how can a therapist help them recover? I have evolved some ideas about recovery that seem worth documenting. They centre mainly on respect: they include affirmation, bearing witness and some evaluation of what constitutes a 'good enough' recovery."

Top

---

Ged Smith: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed person is put in a psychiatric hospital

"The last meeting I had with the staff was during a ward round. Kim's case was discussed in the presence of several people who did not know her. This was exactly the situation Kim had tried to protest about - the objectifying 'gaze' of those in positions of power over those they label, judge, diagnose, drug and incarcerate. The last time I saw Kim she looked drawn and thin. She had lost her sparkle and her sense of humour. Her last words to me were ' You can't do anything in this place'."

---

Liz Burns: Literati - Fugitive pieces by Anne Michaels

"In therapy, narratives may be changed, transformed in the telling, to something which makes sense of the senseless and gives voice to the previously unspoken."

Top

---

Phil Roberts: Working with children who have witnessed domestic violence

"These contradictory feelings about father would transform into arguments and fights between them for and against Dad, as if each had to push the unacceptable feeling (love or fear) into the other. In another family, Tony (aged nine) put it more simply: 'I don't want to see my father because I might get to like him again."

---