This article provides techniques on understanding how different therapies affect women's recovery from abusive relationships.
Research provides insight into the types of behavior exhibited in abusive families. The family members:
- Repress their feelings to the point of numbness
- Become reactive in expressing their emotions
- Are not able to identify or deal with their emotions
- Dissociate from reality
- Use fight or flight behaviors as coping mechanisms in order to feel safe (Dayton, 1994)
Psychodrama and Experiential Therapies
Through psychodrama and experiential therapies, a woman’s self has the opportunity to emerge in a safe environment. Psychodrama provides the opportunity for the victim of the abuse to resolve issues of transference by working with them in a controlled environment. Group therapy enables the individual to remain in an anxiety-prone situation and process difficult emotions.
Narrative and the Psychoanalytic Process
A study by Spiegel (1985) provided a blueprint of the different methods used with narrative in the psychoanalytic experience with clients:
- Freud interpreted narrative truth as truth within the realm of fantasy or experiential truth without historical accuracy. Freud believed narrative truth was a method of rewriting a client's history in order to simulate their history.
- Sullivan (1962) believed experimental truth was a “truth in process”.
Therapy: Women and Incest
Studies show how women’s decisions to remain in abusive relationships often stem from earlier incestual relationships. Siegel (1985) believed women saw their father as a shadowy figure, as associated with incestual relationships, and their mother as domineering.
In childhood, young girls abused by their fathers find it necessary to:
- Distance themselves from their father
- Deal with their father's maleness due to the probability of the repression of an incestuous relationship
Siegel believed that the “truth process” went beyond narrative or historical truth. As more information surfaces, a deeper level of truth emerges. There is the urgency to move toward gratification or self-protection to self-negation.
In working with clients, Seigel found there was a truth in their fantasy. The relevance of respecting the fantasy and assisting the client in recognizing the truth hiding within the fantasy was paramount to their recovery.
Therapy: Battered Women’s Experiences
Some truths, the unresolved suffering battered women experience, are so unbearable that in order to survive they must hold on to any sense of self-identity, they must “evade the meeting of the cataclysmic truth”. Abused women cannot confront the truth concerning the core root of their psychological and emotional pain. It is important for them to store the narrative within their unconscious until they are emotionally and psychologically strong enough to deal with it in a safe environment. Spiegel wrote of the danger of premature closure with battered women in traumatic circumstances.
