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Therapists working with traumatized patients suffer from their closeness to this horror. They come to feel personally the experience of victim, abuser, accomplice and bystander. Patients’ experiences resonate with therapists’ own trauma. But therapists also feel uplifted by witnessing the courage of survivors in facing their private horrors and in daring to reach for a more hopeful future. They feel themselves enriched as they participate in this progress with their patients, and they gain the satisfaction of helping people overcome trauma and move on with their lives.
Richard Gartner's book is hard to read and to review because it is so full of painful experience. Many chapters have case material full of sadistic cruelty, selfish use of children and callous disregard for their needs. One can lean on its concepts of resilience and counterresilience for support, even though they are sometimes elusive in their meaning. Many of the contributors to this book describe their personal journey into the field of doing therapy for trauma survivors. A number of the contributors also coin their own terms to describe their work, in line with Gartner's countertrauma and counterresilience.
Gartner is a leader in bringing attention to the suffering of men who were sexually abused as boys and in describing their treatment (Gartner, 1999, 2005). In this new book he has expanded his focus to the relations between men, women, and their therapists working with trauma of all sorts. The contributors to this volume include some of the most important people working in this field. Gartner introduces the papers in this book with a look at the language that has been used to describe work with adults traumatized as children. He uses the terms countertrauma and counterresilience to emphasize the normality and inevitability of this relational flow of internal reactions between two people, rather than to give priority to the idea of trauma residing first in the patient and then transferring to the t