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This paper summarises over twenty years of work to develop a model and tool for addressing emotional development within the context of attachment relationships. The story charts the process and results, arriving at a useful approach for helping people with intellectual disability and additional emotional disability. The latter follows from trauma and results in the individuals being described as having “complex needs”. This approach works and can allow the individuals helped to live in open environments with supportive, well-trained staff.
Key words: Intellectual disability, trauma, emotional disability, working model, attachment, psychotherapy
“Masochism”, behaviourally defined as the tendency to be abused, hurt, or humiliated by others or oneself, is a highly controversial term. On the one hand the term usefully describes a recognisable problem in living. A term that accurately refers to a recognisable behaviour and provides a useful, experience-near dynamic formulation is a benefit. On the other hand, the term may connote victim-blaming or be used in a victim-blaming way. Unfortunately, the term masochism, has traditionally come with a dynamic formulation that is experience-distant, humiliating to the person to whom it is ascribed, and in my view, simply wrong. In much of the previous literature, a problematic logic has prevailed, according to which what might be called masochistic strategies for living have been viewed solely in motivational terms, involving the imputation of a desire to be abused, hurt, humiliated, or dominated—presumably because these are found pleasurable. This motivational definition of pleasure in pain has led to a diagnostic dismissal of the abuse and suffering of many people who have been harmed in relationships, or who inordinately hurt or punish themselves. When the patter