Treating Attachment Abuse: A Compassionate Approach

305 Pages·1995·11.3 MB·English

by  Steven Stosny PhD

Treating Attachment Abuse
Steven Stosny, PhD, Director
of the Community Outreach
Service, which serves clients in
and around Washington, DC,
received his doctorate in clini-
cal social work from the Univer-
sity of Maryland at Baltimore.
He has treated more than 600
perpetrators and victims of var-
ious forms of attachment abuse
and is the author of books, ar-
ticles, and chapters about vari-
ous forms of abuse. During the past 5 years Dr. Stosny has
developed the Compassion Workshop, and has worked with a
highly varied population of abusers and victims. His passion
about attachment abuse grew from his childhood experience
in a violent home.
Jratfmg
Attachment
Abuse
A Compassionate Approach
Steven Stosny, PHD
SPRINGER PUBLISHING COMPANY
Copyright © 1995 by Springer Publishing Company, Inc.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the prior permission of
Springer Publishing Company, Inc.
Springer Publishing Company, Inc.
11 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036
Cover design by Tom Yabut
Production Editor: Pam Lankas
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stosny, Steven.
Treating attachment abuse : a compassionate approach / Steven
Stosny.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical reference and index.
ISBN 0-8261-8960-1
1. Psychological abuse. 2. Attachment behavior. 3. Caring.
I. Title.
RC569.5.P75S76 1995
616.85'82—dc20 95-7295
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
To my mother,
from whose suffering
this treatment was born
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Introduction ix
Part I The Role of Attachment
in Abuse
1 Beginnings: Self-Building, Abuse, and Treatment 3
2 The Experience of Attachment 13
3 Attachment Abuse: Why We Hurt the Ones We
Love 30
4 Pathways to Abuse: Deficits in Attachment
Skills and Affect Regulation 42
5 A New Response for Clinicians in the Prevention of
Emotional Abuse and Violence 63
6 Compassion and Therapeutic Morality 77
Part II Treating Attachment Abuse
7 The Compassion Workshop, Module One: Healing 91
8 The Compassion Workshop, Module Two:
Dramatic Compassion 139
uu
um Contents
9 The Compassion Workshop, Module Three:
Self-Empowerment;
Module Four: Empowerment of Loved Ones 165
10 The Compassion Workshop, Module Five:
Negotiating Attachment Relationships;
Module Six: Moving Toward the Future 200
Epilogue 238
References 241
Appendix A. Pilot Evaluation oj the Compassion
Workshop 261
Appendix B. The Attachment Compassion Scale 279
Index 281
Introduction
The treatment described in these pages offers a systematic
approach to an often underestimated reason that people seek
the help of clinicians. Nearly everyone who goes into counsel-
ing, for whatever reason, does so in the throes of failed self-
compassion. Such failure, prominent in symptom-forma-
tion, eventually depletes compassion for others, as it disables
natural self-healing and self-nurturing capacities, in effect,
suppressing the immune system of the psyche and rendering
self-regulation arduous and painful.
COMPASSION AND SELF-BUILDING
As the salient attachment emotion, compassion plays a key
role in the self-building function of the innate attachment
drive. "Self-building" refers to the unique power of interac-
tions among attachment figures to build an individual's
sense of self, particularly personal value as an attachment
figure: whether one is worthy of love and whether one's love
is worthy of others. Obviously, the stakes of self-building
loom high, with emotional rewards among the greatest of hu-
man experience: love and secure attachment. These, in turn,
stimulate deeper self-compassion, in a kind of happy feed-
back loop, depicted in Figure I.I.
DC