Many women who experience intimate partner violence are left with significant and long-lasting mental health effects resulting in survivors seeking help from psychologists. However, the voices of women who have sought such help are mostly absent in research. To address this gap, we interviewed 20 women survivors of intimate partner violence about their experiences when seeing psychologists. We analysed this data thematically and developed two main themes relating to women’s experiences of psychologists after intimate partner violence. These themes were: mirroring abuse or being supportive and it did me quite a bit of damage. Our research suggests that these women experienced suboptimal mental healthcare after intimate partner violence and that the effects of this were not neutral but were damaging. Positive experiences suggested that these women appreciated practices aligned with feminist and trauma and violence-informed approaches. This study fills in some details about women’s experiences, which can be used to further inform trauma and violence-informed approaches.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Women reported psychologists mirroring the abusive behaviours of intimate partner violence.</li><br /><li>When psychologists mirrored abusive behaviours, women reported re-traumatisation and inhibited help-seeking.</li><br /><li>Women reported positive experiences leading to healing and new directions when the care aligned with trauma and violence-informed approaches.</li></ul>
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a complex and multifaceted problem gaining increasing attention within mental health research and practice. IPV explanations focus on both individual and systemic levels; however, it is increasingly acknowledged that a single level explanation may not be sufficient. The practices of clinical disciplines may, however, still privilege an explanation at one level over another, which will influence how they work with clients. It is likely that one such clinical group, psychologists, may play a critical role in helping victim-survivors to understand and explain their experiences of IPV. However, we were unable to find any studies focusing on women’s perceptions of psychologists’ role in this. Additionally, we know little about women victim-survivors’ perceptions of why their partners use IPV. To address these gaps, the research question for this study was: What explanations resonate during counseling for women in understanding their partner’s abuse? To explore this question, 20 women who had seen psychologists after experiencing IPV participated in semi-structured interviews. The interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and three themes constructed from the data. The first two themes, narcissist description was helpful and not all bad all the time, showed that the women found it powerful in their healing processes when psychologists offered the opportunity to discuss their partners individual characteristics as explanations for their use of IPV. The third theme, structural explanations, showed that some of the women also reflected on wider structural contexts. Implications for clinical practice include the potential healing effect when practitioners can move along a continuum of explanation levels, covering both the inner and outer worlds. Implications for research into IPV perpetration are that women hold expertise and insight into individual perpetrators and could make valuable contributions to this field.
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