Overcoming Powerlessness in the Clinical Exchange With Traumatized Patients

Abstract

In this comment to Paolo Stramba-Badiale’s description of his clinical case, I argue that the therapist’s acknowledgment of feelings of powerlessness both in self and in the patient, without surrendering to them and without untimely attempting to overcome them, is a major factor of therapeutic change in the treatment of dissociative adults who had been chronically traumatized since early childhood. Consideration of the dynamic tension between the motivational system engaged in coping with environmental threats (freezing-fight-flight-feigned death) and the care-seeking (attachment) system provides the background for the argument, together with the knowledge of the controlling interpersonal strategies that typically follow, during childhood, infant attachment trauma.