Disability Psychotherapy

Much has been written about cognitive development in those who are cognitively impaired. Much is written about attachment for people who don't have disabilities. Yet people with disabilities have suffered discrimination and neglect of their emotional needs, perhaps because the pain of difference cannot be tolerated, perhaps because of lack of will or lack of knowledge. This book aims to help to fill the knowledge gap and to encourage others to overcome their resistance to facing the pain, and will be an important contribution to our understanding of the world of disability and emotional deprivation.In this book - a result of over twenty years experience with people who have disabilities and additional distress as a result of traumatic life experiences - an attempt is made to bring together what we know about early emotional development and the consequences of failure to provide an emotionally nurturing experience, and the results are then applied to people with disabilities. There are ways of working that help, and when appropriately targeted, make a huge difference to some very complex and distressed lives, and the evidence points to the possibility of effective interventions to correct the damage, and that with the correct intervention, individuals can be saved from incarceration in secure units, for example, and have a much improved quality of life.