Casey Foster

About

The myth I would most like to retire is that this requires a dramatic origin. People measure their history against the worst version they have heard of and conclude that theirs does not qualify, which keeps a very large number of people out of treatment indefinitely. Severity is a poor predictor. Abuse that was prolonged, ordinary, and undramatic produces effects every bit as durable as anything more obviously terrible. They are in some respects harder to identify, because there is no single event to point at. We work from effects rather than from events. What happened to you does not need to be impressive to be treatable. My first setting was crisis services, where I learned very quickly that the size of an event predicts very little about its consequences. If yours does not sound dramatic enough, that is not a disqualification. Effects are what we treat here, not events.