The Therapist's Emotional Survival

Sexually abused and traumatized patients need therapists to understand their pain. Therapists must be able to handle their own baggage (rescue fantasies, for instance) and to process their own feelings on a daily basis in order to contain and use them.

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This book explores the private thoughts of the therapist in response to the patient's inner expressions and how each affects the other over the course of treatment. Perlman documents his own journey of having treated trauma. and sexually abused patients over many years. He details the issues the therapist needs to deal with, the emotional. strain, how the therapist's own traumas and history shape his behavior and intrude into the therapeutic process, and how he and others he has supervised, have come to manage this difficult process and maintain emotional health. Perlman illustrates this with powerful revealing of his thoughts, dreams, memories, history, personal psychotherapy, and emotional reactions. From this the author has developed a model of treatment that maximizes the patient's growth, and helps therapists understand treatment and develop more fully as people as well. This human and caring approach allows patients and therapists to open up to deeper experience within themselves and promotes healing in both.