Barbara Duncan
It was Barbara’s professional passion that led her to write Who’s Got Your Back? Graduating from Furman University and completing her graduate work at the College of William and Mary, she began her counseling career in the Ninth District Juvenile Court in Gloucester, Virginia. There she provided family counseling focusing on working with adults who had been abused as children and began to recognize the overwhelming damages that many of her clients carried with them throughout their lives. Her training in the Court Services Unit culminated in the development of a comprehensive program on the treatment of abuse.
Barbara became a Licensed Professional Counselor in 1989 and later a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in 1998 establishing the R.E.A.C.H. Centre in 1990, Reach Every Adult and Child to Heal. In the course of her practice she served as an expert witness in sexual abuse cases for the courts.
In 1992 her practice was featured in the Healing segment of Scared Silent, a nationally televised documentary on child abuse hosted by Oprah Winfrey. Also in 1992, she was invited and interviewed as part of The Montel Williams Show on the topic of teen violence.
As a trainer for the American Counseling Association from 1993 – 1995, she taught seminars across the country on the topics of Treating the Intergenerational Cycle of Abuse and on Healing the Violent Family.
In the summer of 1994 she was appointed as Associate Faculty Member at Johns Hopkins University teaching “The Intergenerational Cycle of Abuse: Assessment and Counseling Strategies” as well as to the faculty of The Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in New York, teaching workshops on the treatment of abuse.
Her professional presentations included workshops for clinicians at Virginia Technical Institute, Vanderbilt University, Duke University and Eastern Virginia Medical School.
Her publications include Reaching Through the Brokenness to Heal, a textbook used in her teaching at Johns Hopkins University; an article, “Sex Offender Treatment Option Program,” Journal of Young Adulthood and Middle Age, Vol. II, Spring, 1990; and “The Overlooked Family Member: Mothers of Incest Victims,” Write To Tell, May-July 1993.
Who’s Got Your Back contains The Equation, a counseling technique developed by Barbara and designed to separate one’s learned behaviors of childhood from the intrinsic traits of one’s True Self, that person each of us came into the world to be. The Equation has been found to be not only helpful in the treatment of abuse but also applicable to many desiring personal growth. The treatment for Charlotte included at the end of the book represents actual treatment used in therapy at the R.E.A.C.H. Centre.
Barbara was perhaps most profoundly affected by the universality of us all and the earnest desire of counselors to be the needed therapeutic hands when she was the keynote speaker for the Maryland Counselors Conference, Solomon’s Island, Maryland 1995 where her husband ended the conference with “Healing From the Heart,” a song Russ was inspired to write by the many people present at the R.E.A.C.H. Centre through the years. Throughout her practice, Barbara was deeply moved by the dedication of her clients to work through the damages of child abuse and the insidious permeation of these scars into their adult lives.
The intergenerational effects of abuse and the many children that she treated in families of abuse made her want to write a novel to include incest and its treatment among other women’s issues in order to reach as many women as possible to help stop the ongoing cycle of abuse in our nation. The awareness of abuse as a blight upon our society today is as important now as it was twenty-five years ago with the airing of Scared Silent, whose purpose was to educate our nation with loving concern for the welfare of our children and adults who have suffered and are suffering the damages of emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Childhood abuse remains a taboo topic in our nation and needs all of us to be willing to help. The beginning of helping is, as it always has been – listening.
