Katie Gentile, in her seminal work on incipient trauma and the social construction of the female body, writes “…violence can create the skin, the limiting membrane differentiating inner from outer, self from other, and enable the emergence of spatial orientation” (p. 109). In this way, according to Gentile, the body provides a vehicle for the temporal linking—the cause-and-effect reasoning—that has been destroyed by trauma.

For Gentile, the process is deeply gendered: How one uses the body as a site of resistance for early abuse and neglect has everything to do with the proscriptions and prescriptions of the cultural surround. Gentile's observations are born out in our consulting rooms: For women physical violence is often directed against the self, whereas for men it is directed outward. (In the forensic arena, I haven't noticed too many anger management classes for girls and women, because of the largely repressed/suppressed character of female anger. This inhibition of anger is counterintuitively robust, even in cases where the woman has ultimately