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Child psychotherapists work extensively with traumatised children and adolescents, as well as traumatised parents. There is a rich, multi-layered literature on trauma within our field, as well as within the wider field of psychoanalysis, including clinical work with looked after children, with adoption, with young people who present with borderline features due to early trauma - the examples are endless. It may seem
obvious to us that child psychotherapy has a lot to offer in conceptualising and working clinically with trauma. Yet, outside the confines of our profession, psychoanalytic child psychotherapy is rarely - if at all - cited when it comes to trauma-focused therapies for children and young people.
As this issue of the Journal focuses on trauma - how we think of it and work with it - I decided to look outside our field and try to get a sense of why our profession gets frequently overlooked in the arena of trauma-focused work; hence I chose a book focusing on trauma from a different tradition, systemic family therapy. ‘Treating complex trauma’ is a 2014 book by two American family therapists, Mary Jo Barrett and Linda Stone Fish. It presents a ‘practical and clinically evaluated model for treatment with clients who have experienced complex trauma’ (p. xvi). We find here a three part ‘blueprint’ for treating vulnerable families or individuals who have been traumatised.
I found the model that the authors have created valuable and effective in its simplicity. They claim that their way of working fits any therapeutic modality, and they stress the importance, throughout a therapy, of helping a patient or family move from what they call a ‘survival mindstate’ (i.e., a traumatised mindstate) to an engaged mindstate (where one can think, immerse oneself in therapy, develop and move forward).
With these principles as their foundation, the authors have built a therapeutic model in three parts and have researched it extensively. They propose that each therapy begins wit