Healing the Incest Wound: Adult Survivors in Therapy (Norton Professional Books

by Christine A. Courtois

Understanding and treating adult victims of incest. “Highly recommended as an authoritative text on incest and its treatment” and “essential reading for all therapists,” Healing the Incest Wound was a groundbreaking book that put incest studies and treatment on the map. Now, almost 20 years later, this bestselling text is fully updated, offering the most current studies and findings on incest typologies, dynamics, and treatment strategies. Drawing on cutting-edge research on incest and other forms of child abuse, it includes attention to their neurological, attachment, affective, and dissociative sequelae. Courtois―a veteran practitioner and an expert in complex traumatic stress disorders resulting from chronic child abuse―presents a comprehensive revision to this classic treatment manual for therapists.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Reference

772 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1988

Reviews

[char]

First of all sorry to put a potentially triggering topic on everyone's feed, I hope putting it under a spoiler will hide it.



Overall I was pleasently surprised by the author's handling of this topic. I still found it a very difficult read and I wouldn't recommend it readily. Cases of incest and its effects are described explicitly (if always in strictly clinical context), and I can't say if (other) survivors will find the author's dissection helpful or healing, but I did set 16 bookmarks and would've set more had I not run out, so I must have taken something from it.

Unfortunately, in my opinion lgbt survivors are treated somewhat strangely by the author, who chooses to stress at several points that homosexual incest is 'generally experienced as a positive', which strikes me as an odd side-note to give after explaining that the effects are generally the same no matter the sexual identity of the child. But that could be me being sensitive.
I also feel that the author blunders at addressing racism as a factor despite part of Ch. 13 'Special Populations' being devoted to ethnicity, especially in contrast with a following section on the complication survivors with mental or physical disabilities face, in which she illustrates how ableism strengthens the double-bind the survivor is under very well and movingly.

[Laura]

While this topic is heavy and can cause literal nausea at certain points in reading, the treatment focus of this book is so practical and thorough. Although I would argue that trauma is the most intense and complicated area in counseling, this text gets me excited to go into trauma therapy.