Family Therapy for Treating Trauma

Abstract

Family Therapy for Trauma: An Integrative Family and Systems Treatment (I-FAST) Approach offers a stand-alone family therapy treatment approach for trauma, addressing a gap in the trauma treatment literature. The book outlines a flexible yet structured family therapy approach that can integrate intervention procedures from any of the evidence-based manualized trauma treatments into a family treatment framework. The authors show how this flexibility offers great advantages for engaging trauma survivors and their families into treatment, who otherwise would not cooperate with standard trauma treatment approaches. They show how tracking and utilizing client and family frames in the organizing of treatment enhances both family engagement and the healing process in general. We show the role of family interactional patterns in the perpetuation of trauma symptoms and how changing these patterns leads to the resolution of trauma symptoms. The book demonstrates how tracking and enlarging interactional exceptions plays a key role in overcoming problems related to trauma. For clients who are not interested in trauma treatment, the authors show how treatment focusing on whatever issue they are willing to address can simultaneously resolve their trauma symptoms.