Abstract
This concluding chapter considers a psychodynamic counseling response to intrapsychic struggles stemming from childhood sexual abuse, molestation, incest, rape, partner violence, and to a cultural context that normalizes these offenses. The discussion details the traumatic sequelae (aftereffects) of intimate violence and brings trauma theory into conversation with Kohutian ideas on the use of empathy to work through traumatic transference and shame. I close out the chapter with a discussion of how to engage Black women’s spirituality as a resource in therapeutic conversations.
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Notes
Pamela Cooper-White, The Cry of Tamar, 2nd Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012).
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
See Pamela Cooper-White, Many Voices: Pastoral Psychotherapy in Relational and Theological Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007);
Phillis I. Sheppard, Self, Culture and Others in Womanist Practical Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011);
and, Christie Cozad Neuger, Counseling Women: A Narrative Counseling Approach to Pastoral Care (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001).
See Marie A. Fortune, Sexual Violence: The Sin Revisited (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2005), 145–146, where she considers the particularity of shame in Christian women who are healing from intimate violence. “For victim/survivors who are Christians, there may be additional feelings of guilt and shame stemming from religious teachings … If a woman accepts the Christian teaching that sexual activity outside of marriage is sinful and that women are seductive temptresses, then she will probably view her victimization as a sexual sin and see herself as being responsible.”
See Melissa V. Harris-Perry, “Myth,” in Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2011), Chapter 2, 97.
Pamela Cooper-White, Many Voices: Pastoral Psychotherapy in Relational and Theological Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 117.
bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self Recovery (Cambridge: South End Press, 1999), 22.
Darlene Clark-Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Midwest,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 912–920.
Heinz Kohut, “On Empathy,” International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 5 (2011): 126.
See Phillis I. Sheppard, “Mourning the Loss of Cultural Selfobjects: Black Embodiment and Religious Experience after Trauma,” Practical Theology 1, no. 2 (2008): 1–20. See also McCrary, “Intimate Violence against Black Women,” 5–6, for her discussion of the community’s role and responsibility to join Black women in public, communal practices of lament that lead to individual and collective healing; and Herman, “Remembrance and Mourning,” Chapter 9, 175–196, in Trauma and Recovery.
Sheppard, “Mourning the Loss of Cultural Selfobjects,” 22–23, quoting Martha R. Fowlkes, “The Morality of Loss: The Social Construction of Mourning and Melancholia,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 27 (1991): 532.
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© 2014 Stephanie M. Crumpton
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Crumpton, S.M. (2014). Womanist Pastoral Counseling: Clinical Considerations. In: A Womanist Pastoral Theology against Intimate and Cultural Violence. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137370907_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137370907_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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