Working with Men Survivors of Trauma and Abuse

In ""Working With Men Survivors of Trauma and Abuse"", Dr. Laura S. Brown demonstrates her approach to therapy with men who have been abused or suffered trauma in the past. In this session, she works with a 30-year-old man who was physically abused as a child. Dr. Brown is able to begin the process of helping this man to feel safe enough to trust another person. In addition to watching Dr. Brown discusses her feminist therapeutic approach in an interview, viewers of the DVD may opt to listen to Dr. Brown's voice-over comments during the therapy session itself. Her commentary provides great insight into the life of a man who has experienced childhood trauma. Feminist therapy concerns itself with issues of gender, power, and social location in the lives of clients. As such, it's unusually well-suited as a framework for understanding trauma and interpersonal violence because much of such violence occurs as a result of people's positions of relative powerlessness in the social realm. In this video, the client is invited to explore his extreme difficulties with trust and personal vulnerability stemming from his experiences of victimization and to begin to see how his strategies for coping with that abuse have created difficulties in his current life. Dr. Brown's focus in this session, as in all of her work, is on the empowerment of the client. In the introductory and voice-over remarks, she shares her analysis of how the gendering of victimization can make recovery from childhood abuse a particular challenge for men.