Treatment issues

Although a comprehensive description of treatment is well beyond the scope of this article, I will close with a general overview of treatment concepts. Treatment for incest parallels the treatment approaches for complex trauma, which emphasizes symptom reduction, development of self-capacities (emotional regulation, interpersonal relatedness and identity), trauma processing and the addressing of dissociative experiences. Compromised self-capacities intensify symptom severity and chronicity. Among these self-capacities, emotional dysregulation is a major symptom cluster that affects other self-capacity components. For example, if a survivor consistently struggles with low frustration tolerance for people and copes by avoiding people, responding defensively, responding in a placating manner or dissociating, she likely will not have the opportunity to develop fulfilling relationships.