Reconstruing the experience of sexual abuse

Abstract

George Kelly was always very clear that constructs were not simply verbal discriminations. Despite this emphasis, most of the clinical literature on personal construct psychology focuses on verbal construing. This article is based on my experience over the past 30 years with the construing of a large number of people who had been sexually abused in their childhood. Often this abuse was never verbally construed and was presented by the person as some form of physical complaint. The majority of these people had difficulty in their adult sexual relationships. The struggle of therapy was to reconstruct the “unthinkable” in a way that allowed the development of “physical sociality.” The effect of this “physical constructing” is examined with particular reference to Kelly's (1955) description of regnant construing.