Helping Challenging Trauma Clients to Open Up: What Have We Learned?

About the Course:

When people live through interpersonal trauma, there is a tendency for many to stay silent about their experiences. Reasons can include loyalty to close others, or the wish to keep family secrets. As a means of protecting others and themselves from the pain of traumatic experiences, many rely on a variety of coping strategies to neutralize or cut off painful memories. For example, some may rationalize away traumatic events, use intellectualization as a defense, or dissociate and keep trauma-related feelings at bay. But silence about the painful past is both emotionally costly, and ultimately unsustainable. How can clinicians help these clients feel safe enough to start opening up about their traumatic histories? In this presentation, trauma expert Robert T. Muller, PhD, will look at the process of helping challenging trauma clients open up in a safe, measured way. Through the lens of attachment theory, using a relational, integrative approach, Dr. Muller draws on theory and uses case examples and segments from his own treatment sessions. This web conference focuses on clinical skills that are directly applicable in a therapy practice.

Publication Date:

Sep 2020

Course Material Author

Recommended For:

This course is recommended for social workers, psychologists, marriage and family therapist and counselors who work with trauma survivors. It is appropriate for all levels of participants’ knowledge.

Course Objectives:

1. Create safety in the therapeutic relationship early on.

2. Recognize client ambivalence about their trauma stories.

3. Describe how to help people in therapy pace the process of opening up.

4. Recognize therapist feelings in the treatment (e.g., the wish to rush into trauma work, or the wish to avoid it).

5. Recognize & use client transference as it relates to opening up about trauma.