Family Violence: Transformation of Developmental Trauma through Personal Construct Psychotherapy

Abstract

The experience of family violence is one of harm that is traumatic and cumulative, leaving children with trauma-related negative core beliefs that have long-lasting effects on their brains and bodies. These core constructs determined by the impact of the violator, while adaptive at the time in organizing the children’s development around survival, are developmentally unhelpful understandings of their experience. Developmental trauma changes core constructions about people, the world, safety, relationships, and the future. It is proposed that personal construct psychology has a role in psychotherapy for child survivors of family violence. The paper will acknowledge two personal construct models for treating trauma. Through the presentation of a therapeutic case study of an eleven-year-old survivor of family violence, the account will attempt to demonstrate the usefulness of these models in treating family violence. This approach is one of credulously exploring the children’s reactive responses to traumatic distress, with the focus of the psychotherapy on understanding the core constructions of self-versus-other, of self-other permanency, and of self-other constancy which are central to a constructivist conceptualization of trauma (Leitner, Faidley, & Celentana, 2000). Meanings are changed by elaborating the traumatic experiences, and reconstructing core constructs through sociality.