Being forced to accept the mantle of "the victim" which becomes the "everlasting survivor" even when a person doesn't feel like a victim before one is allowed to heal is extremely counterproductive and can block healing, change and evolution from  happening at all - as is the ongoing exhortation that a person must somehow accept that "It's not your fault!" when in fact they feel with every fibre of their being that is IS THEIR fault.

In this article, Dr Hartmann makes the case for simply working with what a person really feels - the intrapersonal truth - rather than to add insult to injury and telling a person what they should be feeling, or what they're feeling is wrong and it's their fault that they're not healing.

Therapeutic metaphor work with child abuse survivors is both fascinating as well as intensely challenging. Because the experience of child abuse survivors isn't the same as that of "ordinary" people, likewise "ordinary" or stock metaphors, as you might find in a dream book or such, aren't going to cut it.

This is why child abuse survivors often react so negatively to standard therapeutic metaphors and may come away thinking that metaphor work isn't right for them - when nothing could be further from the truth. You just have to find the right kind of metaphors ...

I think there is a global and general if rarely spoken out aloud idea even amongst healers that child abuse survivors and especially child sex abuse survivors "are too broken to heal" and all we can hope for is some kind of minor symptom relief. I'd like to firstly, put this idea squarely on the table (and out of the closet!) and secondly, discuss the flaws of that presupposition.