Some time ago I read an article from the New York Times Magazine that proposes the potential benefit of repressing traumatic experiences rather than verbally re-living the story over and over. What I appreciated about the article is the consideration given to the fact that not all people cope in the same way. For some, talking about their experience is healing, while for others it only serves to prolong the trauma.

The article featured techniques practiced by an abuse survivor-turned psychologist, Dusty Miller, who works on the faculty of the Family Institute of Cambridge, as well as practicing and consulting. Two of them caught my attention as potentially useful in my work. To wit:

She began to consider directing her clients away from their traumas and toward the parts of their lives that ”gave them more juice.” She found that it worked. With trauma survivors, Miller now never begins a group session by asking, ”How are you feeling?” ”Oh, my God, that would just be a disaster,” she says. ”All I’d get was, ‘Terrible, fearful, awful.’ Instead I say, ‘What strengths do you need to focus on today?”’ In one session, Miller hands out paper dolls and bits of colored paper. Trauma survivors are told to glue the colored paper onto body parts that hurt or have been hurt, ”but then,” Miller says, ”we don’t stop there. We turn the dolls over, onto a fresh side, and participants use the same bits of paper to design a body of resilience.”

What powerful, lovely concepts: focusing on strengths, creating a body of resilience. This article calls into question the efficacy of long-term talk therapy, which is certainly worth examination. While I don’t favor psychotherapy being rigidly ruled by administrators of HMOs, I do think that effective therapy does not need to be lengthy or soul-excavating in all cases. I am reminded just now of the book, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse, a dialogue/debate written by psychotherapist James Hillman and essayist Michael Ventura. It’s worth a read.