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Healing Incest and Complex Childhood Trauma with Couples: A Collaborative Change Model Vol. 3
by Mary Jo Barrett
Adult survivors of childhood interpersonal violence who have begun their healing journeys need skills and support for solidifying gains and moving forward toward healthy and rewarding adult relationships. This video, the final in our three-volume series, features the third phase of Mary Jo Barrett’s Collaborative Change Model through which you will learn to help clients strengthen and consolidate positive change.
Most couples enter therapy hoping for change, but real transformation takes hold when the skills learned in-session become part of daily life. In this third and final volume of the series, trauma specialist Mary Jo Barrett guides you through Stage 3 of the Collaborative Change Model, where couples consolidate their work, integrate new skills, and begin to experience arguments, triggers, and tensions as opportunities for deeper connection. You’ll learn how to transition from a direct therapeutic role to a more supportive one as couples move from the safety of therapy to the security of their own relationship.In this remote follow-up session conducted more than a year after their treatment concluded, you’ll reconnect with Willow and RJ as they reflect on how the tools they learned in therapy continue to support them in their lives. Their feedback illustrates one of Barrett’s core principles: healing within the relationship facilitates personal healing and growth. You’ll see how they use their expanded inter- and intrapersonal resources to navigate life’s stressors, sustain emotional presence, and nurture their connection. Barrett highlights key themes of consolidation—ritual, review, validation, and empowerment—and demonstrates how to help clients integrate change in ways that feel authentic and meaningful.
Join Mary Jo Barrett in this powerful final volume and discover how to foster lasting change not only within the therapy room, but in clients’ daily lives—helping couples transform their relationships, experience personal growth, and carry forward a vision of connection that endures.
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. 3 brings the Collaborative Change Model (CCM) into its final phase: Consolidation, where couples integrate therapeutic gains and begin using their skills independently, not as homework but as new skills integrated into their daily lives. In this volume, clinicians observe a rare follow-up session conducted over a year after therapy ended with Willow and RJ—a couple who came to therapy seeking alternatives to the negative cycles of escalation and disconnection in their relationship, and are now living the change they once struggled to imagine.
Where Volume 1 built safety and Volume 2 challenged patterns and expanded realities, Volume 3 demonstrates what happens when couples internalize the gains made in therapy. The focus shifts from correcting patterns to engaging vulnerabilities, integrating resources, and celebrating change. Barrett guides the couple in reflecting on what has endured, what has transformed, and how the interpersonal skills they learned in therapy have been generalized beyond the relationship into friendships, workplaces, and family systems. Throughout, she highlights one of the model’s core tenets: when partners heal within the relationship, they strengthen the intrapersonal capacities needed for individual growth.
This volume clearly demonstrates how Barrett transitions from an active, directive presence to a supportive, reflective one. Willow and RJ share how they use co-regulation strategies, reflective communication, compassion, and meaning-making processes spontaneously and effectively. Their integration of the “yellow/red zones,” their awareness of triggers and needs, their ability to interrupt old cycles, and their expanded emotional repertoires all demonstrate what consolidated trauma-informed couples therapy can look like in real life.
Clinicians will leave Volume 3 with a clear understanding of how to help couples anchor progress, internalize therapeutic principles, and carry their growth forward long after therapy ends.
Where Volume 1 built safety and Volume 2 challenged patterns and expanded realities, Volume 3 demonstrates what happens when couples internalize the gains made in therapy. The focus shifts from correcting patterns to engaging vulnerabilities, integrating resources, and celebrating change. Barrett guides the couple in reflecting on what has endured, what has transformed, and how the interpersonal skills they learned in therapy have been generalized beyond the relationship into friendships, workplaces, and family systems. Throughout, she highlights one of the model’s core tenets: when partners heal within the relationship, they strengthen the intrapersonal capacities needed for individual growth.
This volume clearly demonstrates how Barrett transitions from an active, directive presence to a supportive, reflective one. Willow and RJ share how they use co-regulation strategies, reflective communication, compassion, and meaning-making processes spontaneously and effectively. Their integration of the “yellow/red zones,” their awareness of triggers and needs, their ability to interrupt old cycles, and their expanded emotional repertoires all demonstrate what consolidated trauma-informed couples therapy can look like in real life.
Clinicians will leave Volume 3 with a clear understanding of how to help couples anchor progress, internalize therapeutic principles, and carry their growth forward long after therapy ends.
Length of video: 1:01:58
English subtitles available
Group ISBN-10 #: 1-60124-791-5
Group ISBN-13 #: 978-1-60124-791-9
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: 1
Learning Objectives:
- Identify ways to transition from a direct therapeutic role to a more supportive one
- Create termination rituals to consolidate therapeutic gains
- Utilize client feedback to support professional growth
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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