"I finally have words!" Integrating a psychodynamic psychotherapeutic approach with principles of emotional intelligence training in treating trauma survivors.

This paper has as its focus the special characteristics of working with trauma survivors who present with premorbid difficulties in identifying and articulating feelings. The challenge described is the dialectic need to revisit and renarrate the traumatic experience to integrate and symbolize the experience while avoiding retraumatization and negative therapeutic reactions. It is proposed and illustrated through a case that implementing psychoanalytic understanding in the context of the psycho-educational principals of emotional intelligence training can expand patients' ability to articulate their traumatic experience. This egalitarian model is less likely to induce resistance and provides the opportunity for patients to develop the "emotional language" needed for a narration of the traumatic experience, thereby enhancing further analytic exploration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)