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Re: Safety - Definition within Article » Dinah

Posted by DaisyM on December 4, 2003, at 22:27:49

In reply to Re: I wish I was an artist » shar, posted by Dinah on December 4, 2003, at 17:33:42

Dinah, I came across this article that had with in it the following discussion of safety. It is a long, complex article about trauma. You might find it interesting. (I am not implying that you suffer from PTSD, BTW.)

CAUTION!!!! This article could trigger..


http://giftfromwithin.org/html/chldhood.html

The Meaning of Safety—From Whom, From What?

Despite trauma therapists’ view of safety as the sine qua non in achieving effectiveness in trauma treatment, no unequivocal explanations have been articulated to date about what is meant by “safety.” The concept of safety is so ubiquitously used and intuitively “understood” that no one ever seems to ask, “Safety from whom, from what?” For many clinicians and survivors, alike, the need for safety after trauma is self-explanatory.

Clinicians, like family members, friends, and pertinent officials after traumatizing disasters, often give good safety advice to help keep victims safe from remembering and reexperiencing the trauma, and from being exposed to potentially dangerous environmental situations. And these reality-based instructions are often very clear, prudent, helpful, and consensually understood. The general impression conveyed is that what victims are to be kept safe from is some unseen, amorphous but powerful physical presence. The presence is ill-defined, but dreadful, lurking out there somewhere in the socioenvironmental sphere. But, more often than not, the true object of fear is the internalized multifarious demonic presences of the abuser.

This pernicious presence comes from inside not from outside the survivor. And only a treatment environment that is capacious in holding and containing primordial fears and anxieties will suffice. In essence, it is the person of the therapist that truly provides safety for the internally endangered victim. Thus, what therapists keep survivors safe from are the internalized presences of the abuser (or perpetrator), or whom they have become as a consequence of exposure to seduction, cruelty, and the demonic madness of sexual victimizing.119 Because the danger of which we speak here is within (not related to any particular external threat), Winnicott’s formulation on the therapeutic holding attitude, is essential here.

 

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poster:DaisyM thread:286568
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20031202/msgs/286690.html