Abstract
Most victims of violence never seek professional therapy to deal with the emotional impact of traumatic events. If they did, they would be sorely disappointed. There are not enough therapists in the world to treat the millions of men, women, and children who have been assaulted, abused, and violated as a result of war, tyranny, crime, disaster, and family violence. When people do seek help, suffering with posttraumatic symptoms, they may find therapists who are ill equipped to provide assistance. The credentialed clinicians in psychiatry, psychology, nursing, social work, and the allied professions are only recently learning to catalog, evaluate, and refine a therapeutic armamentarium to serve traumatized clients. The ambitious collection of chapters in this volume is one such arsenal. The prodigious efforts of Charles Figley, co-founder of the Society for Traumatic Stress, and organizer of the Psychosocial Stress book series (Brunner/Mazel) and the Stress and Coping Series (Plenum Press), are important resources for professionals concerned with traumatic stress reactions. A cadre of clinicians have also shared insights and approaches, face-to-face, and through written works, defining principles and techniques that address the worldwide problem of posttraumatic readjustment. Recently, I assembled a sampling of those clinical insights (Ochberg, 1988) and attempted to define the commonalities in assumptions and approaches to therapy. The common ground is the foundation of posttraumatic therapy (PTT). The individual distinctions that separate clinicians who share this common ground are the inevitable differences of creative minds.
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Ochberg, F.M. (1993). Posttraumatic Therapy. In: Wilson, J.P., Raphael, B. (eds) International Handbook of Traumatic Stress Syndromes. The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2820-3_65
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-2820-3_65
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