SATURDAY MORNING SEMINAR SERIES 2012
Dr Andrew Leon & Dr Warwick Middleton
“Attachment Dynamics, Incestuous Abuse Continuing into Adulthood, and Dissociation”
(Numbers for this seminar are limited – please register early)
Saturday, 19 May 2012
9.30 am – 12.30 pm
Y Hotel Conference Centre
Mezzanine B , Level 1,
5-11 Wentworth Avenue, Sydney
Dr Andrew Leon M.B.B.S., M.Psychotherapy, Dip.Psychotherapy (ANZAP). Andrew Leon is a physician in psychiatry and psychotherapist in private practice In South-Eastern Sydney. He is a member of the ANZAP Faculty and founded the ANZAP Library. Andrew has an interest in psycho-physiological experience, hypnosis and attachment.
Dr Warwick Middleton MD, Adjunct Professor, La Trobe University and Associate Professor, University of Queensland, Chair of Cannan Institute, principal architect of the Trauma and Dissociation Unit, Belmont Hospital Qld, (currently in its sixteenth year of operation), is a Fellow of International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. Professor Middleton is an internationally acclaimed psychiatrist - researcher, educator and writer in the field of child abuse/trauma.
Seminar Description: The ability to maintain an enduring silence is an essential feature of the abuser’s power. Remove that silence and you make him powerless. The reality of ongoing incestuous abuse during adulthood has remained largely hidden, yet it is a phenomena associated with a sizable minority of individuals who exist in the Dissociative Identity Disorder spectrum. This seminar examines the press reporting of such cases, their clinical phenomena and the processes of attachment dynamics, fear and conditioning that has allowed such individuals to be abused for decades without society noticing and intervening in any effective way. The clinical challenges that such individuals represent and how they inform therapeutic approaches to all DID patients is discussed with such issues being illustrated by reference to case material.
Seminar Abstract: Whilst the subject of ongoing incestuous abuse during adulthood has never been addressed in a systematic way by the professional literature, accounts of such cases have been appearing long term. The Josef Fritzl case added a new impetus to reporting such abuses in the lay literature. Forty four such cases from 24 countries that have been identified in English language press accounts of the five years commencing January 2007 are discussed in the light of minimal coverage of such issues in the professional literature. Cases of enduring incest are not rare and typically incorporate decades of sexual abuse, frequently result in pregnancies, and commonly incorporate ongoing violence and death threats.
Approximately 13% of patients with Dissociative Identity Disorder at the time of presentation as adults report incestuous abuse continuing into the adult years and for many, the abuse is current and ongoing. A series of 10 such incestuously abused women is presented. Typically these patients report being sexually abused from under age three. The manipulation of their sexual response assists in conditioning an enduring sexualized attachment, while shame and fear are used as key components in maintaining compliance and silence. Most describe the induction by their paternal abuser of orgasm at around the age of six. Such women have high indices of self-harm and suicidality and are prone to place themselves in dangerous reenactment scenarios.
The average duration of incestuous abuse for this group of women was 31 years and the average estimate of episodes of sexual abuse in their lives, 3,320. Most such women experience being "fused" to their father and do not feel that they have ownership of their own body. Generally their mother was reported as an active participant in the sexual abuse or at least as having done nothing to protect their daughter. The fathers, despite a propensity to use or threaten violence to their daughters are generally outwardly productively employed, financially comfortable, stably married and half have had close involvement with a church. Suicide and murder occur within the first or second degree relatives of these women at a high frequency. All 10 women had been sexually abused by various groupings of individuals connected to their fathers.
The attachment issues of such women in relation to primary perpetrators is discussed as well as how this informs the treatment proces
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