Therapists have an undying faith in the capacity of talk to resolve trauma. That confidence dates back to 1893, when Freud (and his mentor, Breuer) wrote that trauma “immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words.”2 Unfortunately, it’s not so simple: Traumatic events are almost impossible to put into words. This is true for all of us, not just for
...more
