Reasoning: Learning to Exercise Critical Thinking and Judgment

D Adverse Experiences In general, trauma-based models attribute faulty reasoning and beliefs among PCA survivors primarily, although not necessarily exclusively, to the effects of abusive experiences themselves (see, e.g., Janoff-Bulman, 1992; McCann & Pearlman, 1990). In the treatment of abuse survivors, therefore, interventions generated by these models tend to target adverse experiences in the form of discrete incidents of abuse as the main cause of distorted thinking. Within the framework of trauma-based models, pernicious programming in the form of critical and demoralizing statements made by perpetrators and unsympathetic others may be acknowledged as a secondary source of erroneous beliefs (Courtois, 1988; Dolan, 1991; Waites, 1993).