You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
For those who have experienced overwhelming early trauma, particularly at the hands of a care-giver, a profound aspect of how they understand themselves may be organized around the premise that love and pain are interchangeable. As a normal adaptive response to trauma, pain can be internalized, and is experienced as an integral part of self and relational experience. Working effectively with those who have been raised in cultures of trauma requires a reframing of the therapeutic endeavour to include, rather than disenfranchise, this survivor self. The different way of relating that a therapeutic relationship proposes is actually threatening, as to give up pain is to give up love in familiar form. Moving beyond the precedent of a painful upbringing engenders an attachment crisis that can be felt by clients as a kind of psychic death. This is inherently traumatic, and will require detailed attention as with any loss. Inclusion requires that we dare to fully comprehend an orientation of self that has its basis in pain and failures in attunement, rather than security, finding connection in learning each other's languages, linguistically and bodily, thus creating a kind of hybrid bridge between subjectivities. Only when lines of communication are established can we slowly introduce and hold our clients through a ‘different kind of love’, to begin the process of non-intrusive holding and containing. In some senses this is a weaning from pain.