I would like to know what to do for those clients – I’ve recently had two – who suffered extreme, protracted trauma years ago (five in one case, twenty in the other) but who remain traumatized, fixated, because they still fear the perpetrator. Both women, during their terrible ordeals, were captives, prisoners in different ways. One suffered mental collapse from daily torture including kidnapping, teeth knocked out, being locked inside the house, “Russian roulette,” repeated rape, Mafia-like webs of surveillance that included family, the children of family members, coworkers, even the attorneys. Men this evil need to be exterminated. The other woman was held captive by a juggernaut of destructive litigation when her long-lost father turned on her, like the angel morphing to the Angel of Death in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Years of losses in court, executed by highly paid attorneys, beginning in the shock of this ultimate abandonment, ending in bankruptcy and poverty.
Las Vegas has Tim Larkin and his Target Focus Training, possibly the most brutal self-defense program in existence. The student is taught to break bones, gouge eyes, choke and disable the perpetrator, and from an offensive preemptive not defensive stance. I recommended these classes to my clients. What can overpower their fear but ascendant brutality? Not even that, not at all, because the evil men have reduced their victims to frightened and devastated children. I’ve urged them to look into EMDR. While I despise the whole “installation of new cognitions” brainwashing part of that therapy, if the women’s memories can be numbed of feeling, then good, very good.
And yet the men are still alive. Like the Eye of Sauron, they can at their whim find their old slaves, toys, victims and kill them all over again. They can flip a coin and go after them again. That is exactly how these women understand their fate. Are they wrong?
What we’re seeing is one point in the symptom constellation of Judith Herman’s concept of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, described as “distorted perceptions of the perpetrator or abuser, which may include ascribing all the power to this person. . . .”* The two women were so consumed by their fear that the anguished eloquence of it infected my heart: I, too, saw these men as godlike in their ultimate destructiveness, while we normal human beings were transparent to their power. I saw them as nightmares and horror movies in real life.
Are they like that? What can be done in these cases? Grasping for an answer, in this case a chauvinistic answer, I asked if they thought a man would be so cowed after abuse. Or might he stand up, stare down these worst of personality disorders and psychopaths, laugh in their goddamned faces?
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.