Trauma and Treading Carefully: Walking Delicate Tightropes Between Safeness and Emotional Challenge

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines some of the challenges of working with trauma. It looks at how more recent understandings of trauma, linked with neurobiology and atttachment theory, have challenged some more traditional ways of working with trauma. The author uses his own learning and mistakes from earlier in his career to think about how we need to change our therapeutic approach to one more appropriate in such cases. In particular, the article emphasizes the dangers of retraumatization and the risks of triggering dissociative states when insufficient attention is paid to the development of a sense of safeness.