Abstract
This chapter will focus on the psychotherapy treatment of military sexual trauma through the lens of Judith Herman’s trauma theory and argue for a more integrated combination of both cognitive and somatic modalities that are both bottom-up and top-down while also being phasic and directed by the survivor’s symptomology presentation throughout therapy. This final chapter is a “call to action” for military-affiliated policy makers and treatment providers to abandon the one-size-fits-all therapy modalities currently used to treat sexual trauma and instead integrate all evidence-based practices and promising somatic therapies discussed in this text into an integrative framework for the treatment of MST.
Emotion is a contentious topic in psychology. It thus makes sense that brain researchers might also have some disagreements about how emotion is instantiated in the brain since if we don’t agree about what we are looking for, and in fact are looking for different things, we are not going to find the same kinds of underlying neural mechanisms.
(LeDoux, 2014, p. 214)
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Zaleski, K. (2018). Putting It All Together: Judith Herman’s Theory of Triphasic Healing and Neurobiological Considerations in the Treatment of Symptoms Related to MST. In: Understanding and Treating Military Sexual Trauma. Focus on Sexuality Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73724-9_9
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