Frontiers Friday #45. Trauma (Part II)
Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development
Frontiers Friday #44. Trauma
What happens when your kids fall sick? You fall sick too.
Spent the last week trying to regain my voice. Had to reschedule an entire day of client work.
Thank goodness I can still do this newsletter without my voice box. (Touch of irony that I'm currently reading a book called This is Your Voice.)
Here's Part II with 5 more recommendations on trauma.
Research: Childhood Trauma as a a Predictor of Change in Couple and Family Therapy
Hot off the press (my superhero Bruce Wampold is a co-author in this).
Two key findings:
a. People with a history of childhood trauma have greater symptoms of anxiety and depression at intake compared to persons without such experiences.
b. Those who had been exposed to childhood abuse responded less to treatment measured weekly on family functioning than a person without a history of childhood abuse.
If you want to preview the article, click here.
Listen: Faling Together, by Rebecca Solnit
Krista Tippett interviews author of Paradise Built in Hell.
Solnit offers a different narrative around our shared experiences of traumatic events. Worth listening.
Web-Read: Trigger Warnings Can Worsen Traumatic Memories
I have not read the original study from Flinders University, Australia (one of the first places that I presented for a conference actually), but I'm intrigued by the unintended consequence of provided trigger warnings, like the ones you see in the Netflix drama 13 Reasons Why.
I've been thinking about this for a few weeks, and I still can't make headway about this.
If you've read the original paper and have thoughts around this, I would love to hear from you.
Audio Course: Dan Hughes: Attachment in Action
Some years ago I was working with youths in the care of the state on an outreach basis, and the work of Dan Hughes really helped me. (Hat tip to Duane Smith)
Particularly, not just learning the theories of attachment, but how to turn the content knowledge into relational, conversation knowledge. Watching Dan Hughes in action was really useful for me. In turn, this sparked off for me a creation of rituals--something that I feel our modernity is really missing for key transitions in our lives-- for teens who were moving in with new caregivers. (More on the topic of Rituals in future missive)
The tip here:
a. First, figure where you are and your growth edge (we talked about this in the Better Results book)
b. Watch a therapist do that in action.
c. Figure your own way of doing by learning not what they say, but the principles behind it.
Here's an excerpt from an interview with the late Rich Simon and Dan Hughes.
Words Worth Contemplating:
"In disasters people don't fall apart, they fall together"
~ Rebecca Solnit.
Bonus:
A reader of Frontiers, Rachel Moore dropped me an email after the last newsletter. She shared an interaction with Gabor Mate that touches on the topic of trauma, sensitivity and creativity.
Read her blog here.
Stay tuned. More on the topic of creativity and highly sensitive persons (HSP) in future Frontiers Friday.
Reflection:
What can you do to bring people together?
BIG HUGS TO NEW SUBSCRIBERS WHO WANT TO BE AT THEIR FRONTIER!
If you've just joined us, I'm glad you can join us at the "bleeding edge." Feel free to check out the back catalogue of Frontiers of Psychotherapists Development (FPD).
And if you want to see past newsletters, click here.
In case you missed it, see the most recent missives
Unintended Consequences
Unintended Consequences (Part II)
Part III of Deep Learner
Part IV of Deep Learner
If you want more musings, my other blog is Full Circles: Reflections on Living