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Healing Incest and Complex Childhood Trauma with Couples: A Collaborative Change Model Vol. 2
by Mary Jo Barrett
Most couples arrive in therapy hoping for a new reality, but the path to real change is rarely straightforward––especially when there are histories of trauma. Once safety and understanding are established, therapists often face the next big question: how do we help couples actually do something different? In this volume, you’ll find a blueprint for supporting this vulnerable transition with clarity, compassion, and collaboration.
Most couples come to therapy stuck in cycles of conflict, hoping for a new reality. But translating that hope into real change can be a daunting task, even for experienced clinicians. In this second volume, renowned trauma specialist Mary Jo Barrett guides you through Stage 2 of her Collaborative Change Model, where session work moves beyond establishing safety and begins to actively challenge entrenched patterns, develop new interpersonal skills, and build a meaningful vision of the future.Now that Willow and RJ, each with a history of trauma, have begun to explore the roots of their behavioral patterns, the process of change can truly begin. Through extensive session footage and rich commentary, Barrett demonstrates how to identify and challenge childhood survival strategies that no longer serve, and how to collaborate with couples to help them move toward their relationship goals. You’ll see how she structures challenges, interrupts escalations, repairs potential ruptures, and expands each partner’s capacity to stay present during moments of tension. This volume is rich with trauma-informed interventions that improve communication, increase intimacy, build trust, and support the internalization of new skills—laying the groundwork for change that lasts.
Join Mary Jo Barrett as she shows how to loosen the grip of old survival strategies and encourage reflection rather than reactivity––helping couples articulate the needs and longings that often remain hidden beneath defensive cycles, and take real steps toward the relationships they long to create.
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. 2 demonstrates Stage 2: Challenging Patterns and Expanding Realities, the active change phase of Mary Jo Barrett’s model. Whereas Volume 1 focused on establishing safety, flattening hierarchy, and creating a workable context for change, this second volume shows Barrett guiding Willow and RJ—each with histories of childhood trauma—through the difficult but essential work of interrupting entrenched reactive cycles and building new relational skills. This phase calls for the therapist to challenge beliefs and behaviors, attend to the pacing, and remain attuned to the couple’s distress responses. Throughout the volume, Barrett models how to use the couple’s moment-to-moment reactions as opportunities for transformation.
Barrett helps Willow and RJ connect their current behaviors to the self-regulation skills they developed as children, and then translating those insights into new options that align with their goals. Barrett repeatedly reframes behaviors such as fixing, freezing, distancing, or escalating as predictable responses rooted in childhood trauma. She challenges the couple to experiment with alternative ways of seeing, feeling, and responding. Barrett uses repetition, role-play, psychoeducation, and other directive interventions to expand each partner’s capacity to stay present in the face of activation. This volume masterfully illustrates Barrett's roadmap to change built on the natural rhythm of safety → challenge → consolidation that repeats in every session and across the arc of treatment.
In two powerful clinical sessions, Barrett compassionately pushes RJ to tolerate “the middle”—the emotional space between intellectualization and anger—and to explore non-cognitive responses to Willow’s anxiety that offer compassion rather than “fixes.” She helps Willow differentiate between authentic emotional needs and trauma-driven urgency, and supports her in articulating needs and challenging negative self-talk. Together, the couple begins to develop new relational skills that they can use to replace survival reactions that no longer serve them. This volume gives clinicians a layered, real-time example of how to shepherd traumatized couples across the threshold from recognition to action, and from surviving to evolving.
Barrett helps Willow and RJ connect their current behaviors to the self-regulation skills they developed as children, and then translating those insights into new options that align with their goals. Barrett repeatedly reframes behaviors such as fixing, freezing, distancing, or escalating as predictable responses rooted in childhood trauma. She challenges the couple to experiment with alternative ways of seeing, feeling, and responding. Barrett uses repetition, role-play, psychoeducation, and other directive interventions to expand each partner’s capacity to stay present in the face of activation. This volume masterfully illustrates Barrett's roadmap to change built on the natural rhythm of safety → challenge → consolidation that repeats in every session and across the arc of treatment.
In two powerful clinical sessions, Barrett compassionately pushes RJ to tolerate “the middle”—the emotional space between intellectualization and anger—and to explore non-cognitive responses to Willow’s anxiety that offer compassion rather than “fixes.” She helps Willow differentiate between authentic emotional needs and trauma-driven urgency, and supports her in articulating needs and challenging negative self-talk. Together, the couple begins to develop new relational skills that they can use to replace survival reactions that no longer serve them. This volume gives clinicians a layered, real-time example of how to shepherd traumatized couples across the threshold from recognition to action, and from surviving to evolving.
Length of video: 2:20:06
English subtitles available
Group ISBN-10 #: 1-60124-790-7
Group ISBN-13 #: 978-1-60124-790-2
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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CE credits: 2
Learning Objectives:
- Demonstrate how to identify and challenge childhood survival strategies that no longer serve
- Create collaborations with couples to help them move toward their relationship goals
- Integrate trauma-informed interventions to support the internalization of new skills
Bibliography available upon request
This course is offered for ASWB ACE credit for social workers. See complete list of CE approvals here
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