ABSTRACT
Posttraumatic recollections and emotions can weigh heavily on professionals creating a vulnerability to strong, often unconscious feelings and reactions such as rage, bystander's guilt, dread, horror, and a sense of privileged voyeurism. Violent death narrows and spirals into an awareness of helpless terror, a "black hole" of painful chaos. The fear of violent death is circumscribed to the dying itself, replayed as a vivid, imaginary drama of a killing. Trauma distress and separation distress are concurrent responses to violent death. Trauma distress takes neuropsychological precedence over separation distress. Because the dysfunctional images and stories are primarily related to the trauma of the dying, supportive strategies to deal with trauma distress are the initial goals of intervention. As violent death is inherently disintegrative and incoherent, the therapist and patient first establish a safe psychological "space" for the telling and retelling of the compensatory and restorative stories, separated from the dying imagery of the deceased.
