ABSTRACT
Writing of his experience with people who have experienced a traumatic event, Turner (in press) states that, although some person-centred therapists take the view that in responding to a person who has experienced a traumatising event all that is required is adherence to the necessary and suf®cient conditions, there are other strategies available to those working in a broader person-centred framework. One such approach is `psychological processing'. This involves a structured meeting which gives the client an opportunity to understand the facts of an event with particular reference to sensory memories. In addition links between cognitive and emotional memories are observed. Lastly, the client is helped with normalisation by having commonly occurring reactions and responses explained to them. Group sessions are more helpful than individual sessions in the early stages particularly for a complicated event. A complicated event is one where a single person's eyewitness account of the event is unlikely to fully explain it because signi®cant physical aspects of the episode occurred in more than one place at a time.
