SEXUAL TRAUMA: A CHALLENGE NOT INSANITY, A Revolutionary Approach To Treatment & Recovery From Sexual Abuse and PTSD, by Prof. K. Elan Jung, MD, brings several revolutionary approaches to the hidden crisis of sexual abuse and sexual trauma, which in some way affects up to a third of humanity.
First, it aims to positively transform the sense of self held by tens of millions of sexual abuse sufferers, and also aid professionals, through a unique, innovative approach: relieve the shame and guilt victims feel by showing how other victims triumphed and improved our world. We find famous leaders, writers, painters, singers and dancers like Queen Elizabeth I, Marilyn Monroe, Orson Welles or Maya Angelou among the victims of child sexual trauma and abuse. Despite suffering an abomination no one would chose, they survived to convert the pain of their trauma into a creative force.
As we will see in the case of groups like the Beat Generation, a perspective born of sexual trauma at times provided a visionary capacity. No one who reads the many extraordinary stories of the victims of sexual trauma will ever view it same way again.
Sexual Trauma: A Challenge Not Insanity then focuses on its second revolutionary thrust: how to treat the victims of sexual abuse and sexual trauma.
Every patient is unique because sexual abuse or sexual trauma can create a bewildering variety of effects: depression, flashbacks, anxiety, panic and many others. Like the first part of Sexual Trauma: A Challenge Not Insanity, these different faces of sexual trauma are illustrated through the stories of its victims.
With the many pathways and faces of sexual abuse and sexual trauma in hand, Sexual Trauma: A Challenge Not Insanity then confronts the challenge of how to treat these many victims.
The treatment of sexual abuse and sexual trauma requires a specific type of working, clinical process.
Unlike other illnesses, in sexual abuse and sexual trauma attempting to diagnose the cause is only the beginning of treatment: finding the cause can simultaneously be part of the treatment. Only a psychotherapeutic approach can offer the victims of sexual abuse lasting relief from their suffering.
The seemingly bewildering variety of symptoms produced by sexual abuse and sexual trauma are the consequence of a special type of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder caused by sexual abuse. Only by addressing the underlying cause of this PTSD can these problems truly be healed, not merely temporarily relieved by drugs or behavioral management.
Sexual Trauma: A Challenge Not Insanity details how and why the psychotherapeutic process of treating sexual abuse and sexual trauma works and a road map to recovery: what patients can expect, the difficulties they face, the nature of diagnosis and assessment, remembering, recollecting and reliving and the working through process.
This is followed by a consideration of sexual trauma and PTSD from a purely scientific perspective, the biological alterations trauma can cause in the brain. Psychopharmacology is very often necessary to deal with those changes and an appropriate and protective part of the working through process in psychotherapy.
The book concludes with practical advice for the suffers of trauma and their psychiatrists and physicians based on Prof. Jung's over thirty years of research, reviewing the literature and practical clinical experience.