NCJ Number
190746
Date Published
2001
Length
34 pages
Annotation
This article focuses on the treatment of couples with a collective personal history of multiple traumatic experiences through a five-stage model of care called intertrauma couples therapy.
Abstract
Each partner in these couples has experienced one or more traumatic experiences such as war, rape, criminal assault, incest, or community violence. The comprehensive, integrative approach to treatment aims to resolve chronic interpersonal hostility, isolation in marriage, fears of intimacy and engulfment, and the persistent revifications of partners’ traumatic memories as a painful product of daily relational encounters. These encounters represent trauma structures interacting with trauma structures and have no end or relief. The five phases include (1) assessment and orientation to intertrauma therapy; (2) stabilization, counter-reactivity, relational training, and acceptance; (3) individualized trauma explorations and neurocognitive processing; (4) conjoint relational/emotional processing and integration; and (5) post-integration and autonomous life skills practice. The treatment phases take the couple from disorganization and intense emotional reactivity to stabilization through integration to an end phase with a post-integration life skills building program for lasting results. Related issues include attachment, specific trauma responses. This treatment model offers a perspective that may be applied to multiply traumatized families seeking integration and wholeness after overwhelming events and to interventions in societal and international trauma in which family members are traumatized either alone or together. 129 references