The black flame: Traumatic amplification and the nonrecognition of sexual abuse

Abstract

The traumatic impact of sexual abuse by a psychotherapist is exacerbated by subsequent invalidating care while an inpatient in a psychodynamically oriented psychiatric hospital. I designate the nonrecognition and mislabelling the reality of the original abuse “traumatic amplification.” This narrative of my personal history is presented as a professional memoir. In my instance, a long-term open psychiatric hospital systematically misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and clinically mismanaged my care and further consolidated the soul-murdering impact of my original therapeutic abuse. Central to my treatment was the active and collusive denial of my having been raped by a therapist. This space of denial was facilitated by systemic slippage of meaning as an assault against truth. “Abuse” was renamed an “affair” with its accusatory and persecutory implications that culminated in my being misdiagnosed as “psychotic,” a diagnosis that displaced the foreclosure of truth on the part of the hospital onto me. Central to healing the damage cumulative sexual trauma inflicts is validation by a symbolic authority to authenticate experience. The open psychiatric experience systemically failed in its provision of care and delegitimised my reality. Validation and, with it, a beginning integration of self, arrived years later in psychotherapy where non-defensive acknowledgement, attunement and mutual commitment were able to be held.