Working with sadism: An embodied relational approach

In this chapter, I present my work as an embodied-relational therapist with a young woman who, in her adolescence, was a victim of a gang of paedophiles. At the time of the abuse, my client, Molly, was one of several teenage girls who were systematically groomed by a ring of men who used the girls as prostitutes. These men formed part of a network of paedophiles who subjugated and forcibly subjected the teenage girls to sadistic sexual perversions, inflicting terror, pain, and suffering upon them during a developmentally crucial phase in their sexual maturation. In this chapter, I describe the therapeutic process and the possibilities as well as challenges of working with this client from an embodied-relational perspective. The emergent themes of sadism and sexual perversion are discussed within their wider theoretical context.