ABSTRACT
The following narrative of a 15-year-old African American girl, Sasha, being raised in foster care from age 10 in Oakland, while extreme in some respects, typifies the lives of girls in a transitional age youth program working with sexually exploited minors. The trajectory of early neglect, rejection, foster care, and adoption are typical of many adolescent clients in an economically deprived urban area. Dr. Kevin Bunch saw Sasha in therapy for three years. During her therapy, she also met with a case manager for a program working with girls at risk for sexual exploitation. Following a referral from her therapist, I met with Sasha and her adoptive mother Miriam to complete a psychological assessment. Sasha’s psychological profile reveals how her depression, behaviors, and attachments are a reflection of her early maternal abandonment and witness to domestic violence and substance abuse. These complex developmental traumas are expressed in Sasha’s projective testing material: the Rorschach (Rorschach, 1942), the Roberts Apperception Test (McArthur & Roberts, 1982), projective drawings (H-T-P; Buck, 1966), the Early Memory Procedure (Bruhn, 1992), and the Attachment Projective Picture System (George, West & Pettem,1997–2007); they show Sasha’s challenging task of attaching to a new caretaking figure (herself a trauma survivor) while continuing to identify with her biological mother, along with her drive to master trauma and relationships as an acting out and sexually exploited minor. Her therapy relationship with Dr. Bunch demonstrates the tenuous nature of trust and the balance of tolerance, engagement, and confrontation it takes to allow therapy to happen. Her work with her case manager illuminates another side of Sasha’s sexual life and behavior that she at times displays openly or alternately keeps hidden due to shame.
