“I Never Told Anyone This Before” is the first book that will enable you to work in an ethical, effective manner, based on empirically tested guidelines, with clients who disclose memories of sexual abuse You'll find that these guidelines result in the creation of a helping environment conducive to the sharing of traumatic re-collections. At the same time, this environment is structured to keep you free from legal risk amidst the “false memory” debate era.

With “I Never Told Anyone This Before”, you will overcome your specific concerns for working with special populations, such as persons who aren’t sure they’ve been abused, persons who are nonverbal, men, and persons who have suffered head injuries. This book also provides you with a language for discussing sexual abuse memories in a manner that focuses on the clients’ experiences. You will explore practice techniques that are based on theoretical foundations, as well as real helping situations with examples from actual therapy sessions. Other specific areas you will learn about in “I Never Told Anyone This Before” include:

• how to facilitate and manage first-time disclosure of abuse stories
• therapeutic use of memories of sexual abuse
• the function of memory in identity formation
• facilitation of disclosures of traumatic history
• avoiding legal risks for therapists in view of the false memory debate
• memory as it is treated by psychodynamic, cognitive, and developmental theorists
• caveats for researching the disclosure of sexual abuse re-collections

Faced with the prospect of working with a possible survivor of childhood sexual abuse, you may be unsure about the therapeutic approach to take. Current controversy highlights the possibility that persons may be harmed rather than helped in the therapeutic process. “I Never Told Anyone This Before” provides you with a combination of theory, research, and practice that will put your anexities at ease.