The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children--and Its Aftermath - Hardcover

Clancy, Susan A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 046501688X ISBN 13: 9780465016884

Publisher: Basic Books, 2010

Synopsis

Few would argue that the experience of sexual abuse is deeply traumatic for a child. But in this explosive new book, psychologist Susan Clancy reports on years of research and contends that it is not the abuse itself that causes trauma—but rather the narrative that is later imposed on the abuse experience. Clancy demonstrates that the most common feeling victims report is not fear or panic, but confusion. Because children don€™t understand sexual encounters in the same ways that adults do, they normally accommodate their perpetrators— something they feel intensely ashamed about as adults. The professional assumptions about the nature of childhood trauma can harm victims by reinforcing these feelings. Survivors are thus victimized not only by their abusers but also by the industry dedicated to helping them. Path-breaking and controversial, The Trauma Myth empowers survivors to tell their own stories, and radically reshapes our understanding of abuse and

About this title

About the Author

Susan A. Clancy is a psychology associate at Harvard and Research Director of the Center for Women's Advancement, Development and Leadership at INCAE. She is the author of Abducted. She has been featured in Scientific American, Psychology Today, and the New York Times, and has appeared on Larry King Live, CNN, and more. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Managua, Nicaragua.

Reviews

As a graduate student at Harvard, Clancy (Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens) was warned by a respected psychiatrist not to challenge the "dominant theoretical framework" regarding sexual abuse, which "fosters and supports the notion that sexual abuse involves fear, force, and coercion" (she's even been accused by peers of hurting victims with her research). But in consequent research on the traumatic effects of sexual abuse, spanning 10 years, Clancy and colleagues found that victims seldom reported "fear, shock, force, or violence at the time the abuse occurred." Rather, trauma arises in the act's aftermath, when victims who were betrayed by trusted authority figures (90 percent of children victims know their abuser) blame themselves for failing to resist effectively-failing to register the "fear" or "violence" in the moment, which always involves more complex factors and feelings than the popular framework accounts for. The shocking body of statistics on sexual abuse-involving one in five women and one in 10 men, at an average victim age of 10 years-and growing attention to PTSD could garner broad interest for this nuanced psychological study.
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Clancy argues the controversial position that survivors of childhood sexual abuse are victimized not only by their abusers, whose acts often leave them more confused (due to incomprehension) than frightened, but also and inadvertently by well-intentioned health professionals, whose interpretations of abusive experiences are often more traumatic than actual events and effects. Well-meaning practitioners emphasize abuse’s violence, fear, and threats, which “do not characterize the experiences that most victims have.” Challenging the traumatogenic model’s assumptions and origins, Clancy questions the “repression” concept of “recovered” memories as oddly selective compared to conceptions of other major traumas. Skillfully interweaving case studies, statistics, and technical data, she disputes that abusive acts destabilize neurobiology as in other traumas. Positing that the trauma model damages victims with inaccurate predictions and ineffective treatments, she recommends tracking consequences via cognitive, behavioral, and developmental pathways because “what hurts most victims is not the experience itself but the meaning of the experience—how victims make sense of what happened . . . how these understandings make them feel about themselves and others.” --Whitney Scott

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 046501688X
• ISBN 13: 9780465016884
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256