Be Careful With this One! (Courage to Heal, The - Ellen Bass, Laura Davis)

Member Name: lily7star

Product:	Courage to Heal, The - Ellen Bass, Laura Davis
Date:	16/08/00 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Has some useful stories, insights, and exercises

Disadvantages: I don't recommend it for someone just beginning to heal.

This has long been the classic recommendation for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to read.....I have yet to read the newer "Beginning to Heal" or the other book suggested in this section currently, "Breaking Free", but imagine they may well be better beginning books than this one.

I have a number of concerns about "Courage to Heal", based mainly on its possible effect on abuse survivors just beginning their healing journey, and they are as follows:

1 It's a *very* intense read, and possibly too hard for many people just starting to deal with this part of their lives...don't try it without loads of support.

2 The exercises are in my opinion, much more suited to someone further along the road to healing, and could be very counterproductive attempted too early, or without adequate support.

3 The attitude is expressed by the authors that if you *think* abuse happened, then it must have done, and many of the exercises rely *very* heavily on imagination filling the gaps.

Memory is a fascinating and imprecise thing, and it's very bad therapeutic practice to "lead" a client/survivor into constructing memories they're not sure of. If it's important to their/your healing, they/you'll recover unrecovered memories in time, but there's equally a need to learn to live with what can sometimes be unknowable.

4 There are wide generalisations made about the effects of abuse which *could* lead to someone feeling "well I have these symptoms, so I must have been abused"

In summary, I think the book is worth dipping into if you have mainly clear memories or you have been thinking about and working on healing for a while, but needs to be treated with care in any case.

I imagine there was a time when this was a totally groundbreaking work, after all, it's not *such* a long time since Freud dismissed claims of childhood sexual abuse as
wish fulfilment. In some ways, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation have reinforced those appalling views, so ignorance and prejudice and disbelief are still being fought today,and I feel this book is to a large extent a response to that, but there are other gentler books out there now - if you're just starting out, try them first!

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