A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy

I began this book because I am a student of Annie's. I could not put it down, feeling like I myself was becoming somehow involved with her relationship with Ben (the 5 year old boy with brown hair and bangs). I felt like I was getting inside both Annie and Ben while watching the beautiful way in which they interacted. I could not be in the room with this book without wanting to read on into the relationship that evolves. The personal aspect of the patient-therapist relationship becomes the center focus as does Annie's life outside of these interactions with Ben. The reflection, time, energy, and exposure that is demonstrated by the author in this book was by far the best I have ever seen. This has become my favorite book, one that I will never live without, and also one that will remind me of what I want to do with my life and how to do it.

This book takes you into the heart and mind of a fascinating woman. It portrays, in sometimes painful detail, the importance of the therapist-patient relationship. We observe two radically different styles of therapy, and the power of each to help or heal. A wonderful read for anyone in therapy - my own therapist and I are using it as a tool to explore our relationship.

I believe this is one of my favorite books of all time. Rogers is an excellent writer -- my words cannot possibly evoke the vibrancy with which she brings her surroundings, her internal process, and her experience of Ben, her five-year-old patient, to life. The book gives a detailed, living-and-breathing picture of working therapeutically with children; at the same time, it shows the necessity of facing, feeling and integrating that which we most fear from our past in order to be fully alive, which is helped beyond measure by having a sensitive therapist to do the healing work with. Rogers' descriptions of Blumenthal, her second therapist, gives us all a standard to hope for, both in terms of the kind of therapist we should all be able to find, and the kind of therapist we should try to be, for those of us in the field.

Annie not only shows a gift for helping to understand children who have been abused and abandoned, but she also gives us an unflinchingly-honest insider's look at her own therapeutic process of coming to terms with recently resurfaced and repressed memories and pain. By reading her story, the reader witnesses first hand the fact that psychological healing does not come about by one person (i.e. the Therapist) having superior knowledge over the other (the client). Instead, Annie and her wonderful analyst chart previously unmapped territories together in an effort to reconnect those "shattered pieces" that made up her own life's experiences. All the DSM categories and pschylabels in the world cannot teach anyone, either therapist or client, about how the act of psychological healing is manifested. Annie shows us instead of telling us, and by witnessing her and her client's process, we get to glimpse something truly profound and not taught in any pscyhology class.

A beautifully written book. Annie Rogers writes about her client's and her own story with depth and wisdom. This book is a testimony that relationships are the most healing vehicle we have, no matter what kind of harm has been done.