Chapter 7.Continuing the Trauma History
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Excerpt
The aim of early sessions is to continue to acquire a detailed narrative of the traumatic event and the client’s traumatic experience. This exploration serves several purposes: it helps to support the trauma-centered frame, it helps in constructing and understanding the client’s trauma schemas and triggers, and it begins the process of imaginal exposure which in itself has therapeutic benefits. Throughout these sessions, the therapist will feel a need to address numerous other apparently pressing issues, such as family problems, legal issues, medications and symptomatic upsurges, and various other emergencies that serve to express the profound distress of the client. Although attending to some of these issues is appropriate and unavoidable, the experienced trauma-centered clinician will attempt to forestall doing so and instead continue to explore the upsetting details of the trauma story.
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