Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy

“Trauma and the Supernatural in Psychotherapy: Working with the Curse Position in Clinical Practice” was published by Routledge in 2023.

The central concept of the book is what I call ‘The Curse Position’. Here I briefly set out how I developed the theory and its key elements.

In my experience of working as a therapist, I have found that some clients bring an immanent sense that they have more bad luck than other people. Despite attempts to ‘break the spell’ of seeing oneself in this way, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the person feels powerless to change. In my experience, most clients who feel this way do not consciously believe that the disproportionate bad luck that they have had is tantamount to being ‘cursed’, yet given the absence of a ‘rational’ explanation, this can lead the individual (often in exasperation) to wonder whether someone - or something - has in fact cast a spell upon them after all.

It also became apparent that those who described experiences of this nature had also suffered from relational trauma beginning at an early age. It is well known that much of our early lives from birth to the age of four cannot be recalled, and I therefore began to hypothesise whether it was this early experience which could not be remembered, but is re-experienced emotionally in the present, and therefore accounts for the most unwelcome ‘cursed’ feelings which continue to return. In such cases, as the early traumatic experience has actually happened, the ‘cursed’ feelings are familiar; yet as one cannot consciously remember them, when they return they are therefore experienced as an impingement on one’s sense of self. This is the essence of what I call ‘the curse position.’

In the curse position, it is as if one’s valuable intuition and imaginative capacity are turned against the self, through either persecution, or idealisation. The role of psychotherapy is therefore to help the individual to relate to intuition in a third way, where it can foster a sense of personal agency; where feelings can be thought about, rather than dissociated or acted upon in ways which cause more suffering to the individual.

You can read more about “the curse position” on the blog section of this website.

You can purchase my book on the curse position from the Routledge website or Amazon