Need Help?
Email or Call: 1-800-577-4762
Email or Call: 1-800-577-4762
2.50 CE Credits Available
Healing Incest and Complex Childhood Trauma with Couples: A Collaborative Change Model Vol. 1
by Mary Jo Barrett
Survivors of childhood trauma can carry those wounds of abuse, neglect, and abandonment forward, resulting in fractured adult relationships. In the first phase of the Collaborative Change Model you’ll learn how to use assessment, validation, attachment, and other therapeutic relationship-building skills to create a firm foundation for lasting change.
When working with couples who have a history of trauma, even seasoned therapists can struggle to help partners recognize how their past survival strategies continue to shape—and often complicate—their present-day relationships. In this volume, the first of three, renowned trauma specialist Mary Jo Barrett guides you through her Collaborative Change Model, which offers a field-tested, research-backed roadmap for helping couples impacted by childhood sexual abuse and trauma. You’ll learn how to confidently create the safety, awareness, and structure necessary to facilitate lasting change.Across session footage and detailed commentary, you’ll watch Barrett work with Willow and RJ—a couple whose histories of childhood abuse, incest, and abandonment surface in the form of negative reaction cycles that leave them feeling out of control and disconnected. Barrett demonstrates and discusses how to build a collaborative working alliance, the hows and whys of flattening hierarchy with trauma survivors, and techniques for developing histories of trauma without retraumatizing clients. You’ll see how she interrupts escalation, offers psychoeducation to normalize experiences, and uses co-regulation to help clients become more receptive to change. This volume is ideal for clinicians working with couples who have histories of attachment issues, complex trauma, sexual abuse, or who are feeling stuck in negative reaction cycles.
Step into the room with Mary Jo Barrett and discover how strong foundations, steady pacing, and genuine collaboration can transform the treatment of trauma-impacted couples and help them reclaim the possibility of secure, safe connection.
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
—Emily Power Smith, MsX, PgDip, Owner of empowers me
Healing Incest and Complex Childhood Trauma with Couples: A Collaborative Change Model Vol. 1 introduces Stage 1 of Mary Jo Barrett’s Collaborative Change Model, a phase devoted to building the foundation required for trauma-impacted couples to safely engage in change. Through a combination of rich discussions and extensive clinical session footage, Barrett demonstrates how attunement, pacing, and transparency create the conditions in which clients can explore long-held survival strategies.
This volume follows Barrett’s early work with Willow and RJ, a young couple, each with histories of childhood trauma. Willow grew up with sibling incest and a family system marked by secrecy, neglect, and blurred boundaries. RJ was raised and then abandoned by a mother whose alcoholism, emotional volatility, and unpredictability left him without consistent caregiving. Both partners developed highly adaptive childhood survival strategies—hypervigilance, conflict avoidance, emotional shutdown, people-pleasing—that now complicate their adult relationship. At the outset of therapy, they report recurring cycles of conflict at home.
Barrett’s goal in these early sessions is not to challenge problematic behaviors or resolve conflict. Stage 1 is about creating context. She works to establish safety, flatten hierarchy, validate their behaviors, and help the couple build a shared language for understanding their reactions. Mary Jo introduces the idea that what each partner experiences as “symptoms” or “problems” are often adaptive responses that helped them survive their childhood environments. She frames these behaviors not as pathology, but as ingrained protective strategies—a reframing that immediately reduces shame and increases engagement.
This volume follows Barrett’s early work with Willow and RJ, a young couple, each with histories of childhood trauma. Willow grew up with sibling incest and a family system marked by secrecy, neglect, and blurred boundaries. RJ was raised and then abandoned by a mother whose alcoholism, emotional volatility, and unpredictability left him without consistent caregiving. Both partners developed highly adaptive childhood survival strategies—hypervigilance, conflict avoidance, emotional shutdown, people-pleasing—that now complicate their adult relationship. At the outset of therapy, they report recurring cycles of conflict at home.
Barrett’s goal in these early sessions is not to challenge problematic behaviors or resolve conflict. Stage 1 is about creating context. She works to establish safety, flatten hierarchy, validate their behaviors, and help the couple build a shared language for understanding their reactions. Mary Jo introduces the idea that what each partner experiences as “symptoms” or “problems” are often adaptive responses that helped them survive their childhood environments. She frames these behaviors not as pathology, but as ingrained protective strategies—a reframing that immediately reduces shame and increases engagement.
Length of video: 2:39:33
English subtitles available
Group ISBN-10 #: 1-60124-789-3
Group ISBN-13 #: 978-1-60124-789-6
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.
Psychotherapy.net defines ineligible companies as those whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients. There is no minimum financial threshold; individuals must disclose all financial relationships, regardless of the amount, with ineligible companies. We ask that all contributors disclose any and all financial relationships they have with any ineligible companies whether the individual views them as relevant to the education or not.
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.
CE credits: 2.5
Learning Objectives:
- Describe the impact of early developmental trauma on adult relationships
- Create a reparative therapeutic context for change conducive to safety
- Integrate components of the Collaborative Change Model into your own treatment planning and intervention with couples
Bibliography available upon request
This course is offered for ASWB ACE credit for social workers. See complete list of CE approvals here
© 2025
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.
Psychotherapy.net offers trainings for cost but has no financial or other relationship to disclose.
Psychotherapy.net offers trainings for cost but has no financial or other relationship to disclose.
You May Also Like…