Description: Psychotherapy clients with histories of childhood abuse and neglect (complex trauma) are ubiquitous across diagnostic groups and often have high drop-out rates. These clients have been unable to heal past emotional injuries and can have difficulty handling exposure-based therapies, which usually are not designed for attachment related problems. Successful therapy requires helping clients to access and explore painful feelings and memories to modify maladaptive emotions (e.g., fear and shame) and construct more adaptive meaning and narratives regarding self, others, and traumatic events.

This Workshop is designed to introduce participants (practicing professional) to the general principles of emotion-focused therapies with a specific focus on how this approach is tailored to the needs of clients dealing with complex trauma. Emotion-focused therapy for trauma (EFTT) is an evidence- based approach with more than twenty years of research demonstrating treatment efficacy and supporting posited in-session processes of change. 

Day One of this Workshop first will present the nature of complex trauma and the central roles of attachment relationships and emotional processes in the development of disturbance. The workshop then will present basic principles of emotion-focused therapies, followed by the EFTT treatment model, how EFTT addresses central features of disturbance, and distinctive features and advantages of EFTT compared to other treatment approaches.  This will be followed by intervention guidelines and strategies used in the Early Phase of therapy.  These include helping clients to disclose painful trauma material in the context of a safe and empathically responsive therapeutic relationship, assessing core emotional processing difficulties, developing case conceptualization, and introducing the primary exposure-based procedure used in therapy - Imaginal Confrontation of perpetrators in an empty-chair.

Day Two will present guidelines and strategies for the Middle and Late Phases of therapy. These include a less stressful alternative to the Imaginal Confrontation procedure, interventions to help deepen emotional processing, reduce fear, avoidance, and shame, access self-soothing capacities, and finally resolve issues with perpetrators of abuse and neglect and heal attachment injuries. The Workshop will conclude by presenting a case example of working with maladaptive anger and avoidant attachment followed over the course of therapy. 

Numerous videotaped examples will be presented throughout the Workshop to illustrate key therapy principles and processes, and discussion of treatment issues will be encouraged. 

1. The nature of complex trauma and the central role of emotional processes in disturbance

2. The EFTT treatment model and how therapy uniquely addresses central features of disturbance

3. Intervention principles for:

1. Cultivating a safe and collaborative therapeutic relationship
2. b. Assessing client emotional processing difficulties
3. Helping clients to re-experience and reprocess trauma feelings and memories
4. Helping clients to imaginally confront and resolve issues with perpetrators of abuse and neglect
5. Reducing client fear, avoidance, and shame
6. Accessing client self-soothing capacities