There is more to the story

For most patients, primary care and generalist settings are the first clinical touchpoints to accessing medical care. As such, they present the formative opportunity for stories to be communicated and trust to be developed between patients and the health care system. The skills of listening, supporting, communicating, and empathizing are essential in providing patient care and promoting strong patient-physician relationships. They are particularly crucial for people who have experienced interpersonal violence. In this piece, I reflect on my experience as a crisis counselor working with an underage survivor of sexual violence. This encounter provides an application of trauma-informed approaches to caring for survivors of violence and contextualizes the effects of intergenerational trauma. Narratives like this one shed a timely, sorely needed light on the role of physicians in understanding and intervening upon the cycle of violence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).