ABSTRACT
Increasingly over the years, both in my own clinical work and my supervision of doctoral students in their therapy with adult survivors of ongoing child maltreatment, a picture has emerged that transcends the abuse trauma model. It is informed by a consistent pattern of clinical observations that is highly congruent with the research findings on abuse survivors' family-of-origin environments reviewed in the previous chapter. There is no question that abuse has been a pivotal experience in the lives of most of these clients, one that has often had powerful and enduring traumatic effects. However, as they recount their histories, it seems clear that for most of them, overt incidents of abuse constitute landmarks that are embedded in and continuous with a much broader interpersonal landscape.
