ABSTRACT
Treating boys who have been sexually abused requires a balance between letting them define the therapy relationship and staying focused on the fact of the abuse and its consequences. Children’s needs are met neither by drifting without focusing on the abuse, nor by speaking only about it. Rather, children need to come to trust that they can focus with the therapist on the abuse and also move away from its shame, anxiety, fear, and anger. Developing this kind of trusting relation is vital for the success of a therapy, a point of view that emphasizes the therapeutic relationship. In this chapter I describe an interpersonal or relational approach to working with children (Spiegel, 1996; Altman, Briggs, Frankel, Gensler, & Pantone, 2002) as applied to work with boys who have been sexually abused. This way of working is compared with trauma-focused, empowerment, and dissociation approaches usually found in the literature.
