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Healing Incest and Complex Childhood Trauma with Couples: A Collaborative Change Model Complete Series
Clients who experienced childhood trauma carry those wounds of abuse, incest, and abandonment forward, often resulting in fractured adult relationships. Learn an effective framework for helping couples heal by creating the safety, motivation and collaboration necessary for meaningful change
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Couples struggling in their relationships come to us in pain, conflict, and confusion lacking effective communication, empathy, and problem-solving skills. Often, we help many of them. However, when childhood abuse, incest, neglect, and/or abandonment enter the clinical frame, adulthood relational stresses and challenges are magnified to the point of unending conflict, desperation and dissolution. These unstable relationship dynamics can go on indefinitely, frustrating even the most experienced couples therapists. What clinicians need is a practical model and effective techniques aimed at healing the wounds of past trauma by working in the present.

In this presentation of four sessions and a follow-up with a young couple, Collaborative Change Model founder Mary Jo Barrett systematically demonstrates how to replace these clients’ deeply ingrained trauma-impacted relational patterns with healthier ones utilizing her blueprint for change. She demonstrates how to address clients’ childhood wounds and vulnerabilities while augmenting their strengths; all within a therapeutic context of structure, predictability, and compassion.

By experiencing clinical sessions, insightful commentaries and rich discussions, you’ll learn how to help free your own couples from the seemingly inescapable effects of old wounds. You will help them to replace defensiveness, withdrawal, anger, and confusion with what Barrett calls, “the 8 pillars of healthy relationships”—communication, respect, trust, friendship, humility, wisdom, generosity, and collaboration. You will learn not only effective techniques, but how to incorporate spontaneity, presence, self-disclosure, and even humor into your work with these challenging couples.   

What therapists are saying…

“Barrett's style of teaching is clear and engaging, showing us when things worked perfectly, as well as where she made mistakes and how she recovered. I love the lack of ego and learned a lot from this course. Most trainings only show perfect scenarios, leaving therapists with questions about when things go wrong. Barrett speaks to this by showing where she could have done a better job. So refreshing, and much more useful than the usual.”
—Emily Power Smith, MsX, PgDip, Owner of empowers me
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Disclosures
Willow and RJ each experienced traumatic childhood family violence—she, incest at her brother’s hands, and he, abandonment by an alcoholic and abusive mother. Years later, their relationship is continually undermined by ineffective conflict resolution skills, poor emotional communication, and both individual and mutual emotional dysregulation. Together they are struggling to maintain an intimate adult relationship. Fearful of their future together, deeply unhappy, and losing hope, they find their way to Barrett.

By watching Barrett at work with Willow and RJ, you will come away with not only a deep appreciation of the complex, destructive, and lingering impact of childhood trauma on adult relationships, but with new and effective skills for freeing your couples from its dark legacy. You will learn how to structure each clinical session to fit the overall arc of the Collaborative Change stage model by:
  • creating a context for change through assessment, validation, attachment, and refuge building
  • challenging patterns and cycles while expanding realities by helping to recognize vulnerabilities, resources, obstacles, and possibilities
  • consolidating through practice, repetition, and opening pathways for evolution
And because Barrett actually weaves teaching into her therapeutic work with the couple, you will learn to:
  • utilize informative and effective psychoeducation around the trauma response
  • teach clients to communicate effectively around sensitive topics using curiosity, compassion, empathy, validation, patience, and intention
  • improve client motivation for treatment by accentuating their strengths
  • structure each of your sessions for optimal outcome by focusing on the pillars for healthy relationships-communication, respect, trust, friendship, humility, wisdom, generosity, collaboration
  • address uncomfortable topics sensitively and respectfully
  • weave reparative role plays into treatment
  • create useful homework assignments around positive communication and problem solving
  • build the essential ingredients of change into your treatment plan—connection, empowerment, value, knowledge, and hope
  • flatten the therapeutic hierarchy to create a safe therapeutic space for these clients
  • use your own gifts and skills to build the collaborative therapeutic relationship
So, regardless of your theoretical orientation to working with trauma, join us in this journey of treating complex developmental trauma and incest and become better prepared to liberate your own couples who have been denied happiness and connection by childhood interpersonal violence.  

Length of Series: 6:00:37

English subtitles available

Mary Jo Barrett, MSW, is the Founder and Director of The Center for Contextual Change (CCC), located in Metro Chicago; a clinical Training Center specializing in The Collaborative Stage Model-a component phase model working with individuals, families, and groups.

Ms. Barrett is a nationally prominent expert in the treatment of trauma and traumatic violence in the family and in our communities who works extensively with helping therapists prevent Compassion Fatigue and heal from Vicarious Traumatization. She is a leading authority on family violence, including the physical and sexual abuse of children, neglect, incest, spouse abuse, and neighborhood gun violence, and has been working on these issues in since 1974. Ms. Barrett has co-authored Treating Complex Trauma: A Relational Blueprint for Collaboration and Change (with Linda Stone Fish) and has co-authored two books with Dr. Terry Trepper: Treating Incest: A Multiple Systems Perspective and The Systemic Treatment of Incest: A Therapeutic Handbook. She provides consultations, workshops, and courses, nationally and internationally, to families, lawyers, psychotherapists, social service providers, staff of residential treatment facilities and staff of governmental agencies.   

Mary Jo Barrett was compensated for his/her/their contribution. None of his/her/their books or additional offerings are required for any of the Psychotherapy.net content. Should such materials be references, it is as an additional resource.

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Additionally, there is no commercial support for this activity. None of the planners or any employee at Psychotherapy.net who has worked on this educational activity has relevant financial relationship(s) to disclose with ineligible companies.
This Disclosure Statement has been designed to meet accreditation standards; Psychotherapy.net does its best to mitigate potential conflicts of interest and eliminate bias in all areas of content. Experts are compensated for their contributions to our training videos; while some of them have published works, the purchase of additional materials are not required for any Psychotherapy.net training. Each experts’ specific disclosures can be found in their biography.

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