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4.0 out of 5 stars
A useful historical link in the progress of AMaC recovery, February 10, 2010
This review is from: Resolving Sexual Abuse: Solution-Focused Therapy and Ericksonian Hypnosis for Adult Survivors (Paperback)
While the use of hypnosis to recover memories of sexual abuse has become hugely controversial and mired in manualized limitation by officers of the court, Dolan's '80s-vintage observations of the typical adult molested as a child (AMaC) are still highly useful.
=RSA= covers a lot of important territory new AMaC therapists =need= to cover before they step into the trench with these typically histrionic and borderline patients and their chaotic surrounding environments. Dolan and the other AMaC therapists of the day saw, for example, that isolation in their own reality was a major problem for AMaCs and that supportive relationships needed to be discovered and/or developed to provide sufficient ego strength to plow ahead through the arduous course of rehabilitation. She also understood a fair amount about the reality-denying dynamics of the typical AMaC family of origin and how they would play out as the patient =remembered=.
We've come a long way since the late '80s in terms of how to deal with the self-destructive dissociation, post-traumatic stress disorder and ego disorganization of the AMaC. Linehan's Dialectical Behavioral Therapy is a testament to that progress. But without people like Dolan, and their mistakes as well as their triumphs, therapists might still be as over-identified, rage-driven and unadmittedly mystified by their countertransferences as we were in the "feminist era."
Added later:
Following a brief rant with a senior colleague about the AMaC (adults molested as children) therapy methods of the `80s (e.g.: in Herman's =Trauma and Recovery= and Bass's and Davis's =Courage to Heal=), she suggested I try to find Dolan's book, read it, and see what I thought. Figuring that it was published in 1991 and reflected the treatment standards of the preceding decade, I wasn't enthused, but I bought it... and finally read it about a year later.
=RSA= was a revelation. Not because it was any quantum leap forward from the standard, well-intended but often damaging methods of its time, but because it showed that therapists like Dolan were beginning to see the flaws in the drag-`em-right-through-the-swamp and confront-the-perp mentality of the angry, feminist, and feminist-sympathizing therapists of that era. What good does it do, after all, to force the patient to relive her (or his) childhood rape memories over and over again? And how does it produce any real sense of self-empowerment for the survivor to confront the perpetrator if the perpetrator is still in denial and well-defended by other co-dependent, abuse- and reality-denying relatives?
I've spent years now having to repair the damage done by the retaliation-, retribution- and revenge-bent soldiers in Alice Miller's (=Prisoners of Childhood=, =For Your Own Good=, =Thou Shalt Not be Aware=, etc.) army. Don't get me wrong; I =adore= Alice Miller for what she did to put an end to even earlier mistreatment of AMaCs. But she was a hothead to the end.
From the perspective of 2010, the feminist rage of the `60s-`80s is now understandable. Miller, Herman, Bass, Davis, Andrew Vachss, Diana Russell and others had played Paul Revere to millions. And once awakened from their dissociative, amnesia-blocked slumbers, most of the newly self-aware were not one bit delighted to find out what had happened. And tens of thousands of them turned their anger into rescue and persecution to deal with their own victimhood (see Stephen Karpman's "drama triangle"). It was a phase, that rather like the blood-soaked French Enlightenment of the 1700s, had to happen, I guess.
Dolan's experience in the trenches demonstrates that she and other mental health professionals =were= figuring this out in the late `80s. Dolan warns again and again about re-victimizing the patient with any form of holding her head under the emotional water line. She was aware that de-constructing and re-constructing the ego of an AMaC is a delicate process.
For example, Dolan (an MA-level therapist; not a Ph.D-level theorist) may not herself have developed the "symbol for the present" and "associational cue for comfort and security" (I =believe= those were Milton Erikson's inventions), but she understood the necessity of using them. (They're still used today by the legions of EMDR therapists who are now able to treat the survivor without doing injury to her.)
Dolan was also mindful of the effects of pressing the patient to move down her therapeutic road any faster than she could handle. It may seem surprising now that one would have to =be= mindful of such a notion. But, sadly, many of the raging feminists of the `70s and `80s were "drill sergeants" who'd either never heard of Carl Rogers or thought that "empathy" meant emotional enmeshment.
I know. I was lurking in the wings as an "emotional release" service provider in those days. I figured out in short order that many of the patients referred to me were far from ready for the Reichian body work the therapists prescribed but did not actually =do= themselves. I was also a first-hand witness to the numerous, Gestalt-based, "blast-effect" therapies of that era... and the piles of bodies strewn about after their dissociative defenses were dismantled long before they had any others to replace them.
Thus, read from the perspective of "historical progression," =RSA= may be useful for the modern-day therapist who wonders how the profession ever arrived at therapies like DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) and ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy), SIQR+DD (self-talk identification, questioning and revision + the "drop drill" mindfulness meditation), much less Shapiro's wonderful, relatively painless, neuropsychology miracle, EMDR (eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing).
I do =not= recommend this book for lay readers, unless they have crossed their own therapeutic bridge and have become comfortable in AMaC recovery, of course. Too many triggers for those who still have that "gun" pointed at their limbic systems.
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