Using context to treat traumatized children.

When treating childhood psychic trauma, context means "putting a perspective to the terrifying experience"--"seeing it in a new light", one might say, or understanding its magnitude and meaning. Of three essential mechanisms behind a young person's psychological recovery from a stress disorder--abreaction, context, and correction-context is the most reflective, cognitive, and conscious of these processes; while abreaction is primarily emotive, and correction is primarily behavioral (involving real or fantasied action). Because context, newly introduced by this author to the psychiatric literature (Terr, 2003), is the most recent and the least well understood of the three mechanisms, it will be the sole focus here.