Healing the Incest Wound: Adult Survivors in Therapy

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Summary: christine courtois is THE international sex abuse expert
Review: Christine Courtois is a gifted and highly brilliant writer AND speaker. Her books are highly truthful and revealing about sexual abuse and exploitation of children and adolescents. She also writes about the resulting psychiatric illnesses, particularly, in the worst possible of all cases, Multiple Personality Disorder, with extreme compassion, Knowledge and sensitivity. Whe writes about the most unpleasant and disgusting subject Earth has to offer with intelligence, good taste and limitless compassion. She is to be COMMENDED for her exceptional work.

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Summary: Comprehensive and Sensitive
Review: In the first chapter of "Healing the Incest Wound" Christine Courtois wrote a description of incest portraying the experience through the eyes of a child victim. The description was an unbelievably accurate composite account of the emotional experience of incest. With each word, feeling, and experience that she wrote I felt more and more as if she had actually witnessed my early abuse.

I found it extremely helpful that Christine discusses the different kinds of incest perpetrated by fathers, stepfathers, quasi-relatives (a person who takes on the parenting role by living situation/emotional bond, but is not related by blood or legal contract. As was the case with me.), and other members of the nuclear family (mothers, siblings), or extended family (uncles, aunts, grandparents, etc).

In her discussions of the different kinds of incest she also addresses the types of offenders. For example: symbiotic fathers, rationalizers or tyrants. Also psychopathic-sociopathic personality types are discussed, including pedophiles with sociopathic tendencies (which comprise approximately only 3% of incest offenders). I found her description of the sociopathic offender to be an accurate description of the man who was a stepfather to me in my childhood. There are also incest offenders that are pedophiliac type or the culture-permissive incestuous father.

In addition to the types of incest offenders she also discusses the elements of the abuse such as use of force, coercion, violence, duration/frequency, age of victim, age/gender of perpetrator, types of sexual behavior/progression over time, peer incest and multiple incest. This is the first book I have read that clearly addresses the unique effects of abuse by multiple offenders.

Christine Courtois also discusses the effect incest has on other siblings who aren't sexually abused, witness the abuse, or are unconsciously effected by the incest.

The rest of the book focuses on the initial and long-term aftereffects at the different ages of growth and development and into adulthood, as well as therapy types and options for treatment (which is useful to both survivors and practitioners).

There is also an extremely helpful section on reporting past and current abuse to child protective services (to protect children who are currently being abused, or from being abused in the future).

As another reviewer mentioned, this is one of the most up-to-date books that provides a comprehensive understanding of the many different forms of incest, without sensationalism or hunting for memories. I highly recommend it to survivors and practitioners.

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Summary: This book has gotten too little publicity
Review: This book starts out with an introduction in which Dr. Courtois explains her background in this field. Some people say that any therapist who talks about sexual abuse promotes deterioration. However, please note that the author says, of her first client, "every time we had her somewhat stabilized, a new crisis would erupt of either her own making or her family's. I did not know about traumatic reenactment at the time and so was thoroughly perplexed.". (page xv). And so, before we even get to page 1, Dr. Courtois recognizes that patients need to be "stabilized".

This emphasis on putting the pieces back together and supporting clients means there is no exciting drama of hunting for ever-more-bizarre and noncredible memories, although she describes victims with recovered memory. She makes it clear though that she's not promoting recovery for the drama of hearing wild horror stories.

The book begins by describing incest from the victim's perspective (if you are a survivor, watch out, because it's tough to read, though it's just a couple of pages). Then there is a more theoretical description of incest, and then she talks about its effects from several points of view: "traumatic stress or victimization theory, developmental theory, feminist theory, and loss theory".

Then she discusses recovery. If you ignore the fact that Dr. Courtois does not present the currently fashionable 3-stage model, what she says about recovery sounds pretty current. For example, in this book, she does not recommend impulsive confrontations or cut-offs, but she never forgets how damaging incest can be. She does not spend much time on memory and legal issues, which were not as in-your-face in 1988 as they are now.

It's a really good book, written with compassion rather than sensationalism, and still surprisingly current.