Family Therapy for Treating Trauma An Integrative Family and Systems Treatment (I-FAST) Approach

"Abstract Family Therapy for Trauma: An Integrative Family Systems Treatment (IFAST-T) offers a stand-alone family therapy treatment approach for trauma, addressing a gap in the trauma treatment literature. The book outlines a flexible yet structured family therapy approach that can integrate intervention procedures from any of the evidence based manualized trauma treatments into a family treatment framework. We show how this flexibility offers great advantages for engaging trauma survivors and their families into treatment, who otherwise would not co-operate with standard trauma treatment approaches. We show how tracking and utilizing client and family frames in the organizing of treatment enhances both family engagement and the healing process in general. We show the role of family interactional patterns in the perpetuation of trauma symptoms and how changing these patterns leads to the resolution of trauma symptoms. We demonstrate how tracking and enlarging interactional exceptions plays a key role in overcoming problems related to trauma. For clients who are not interested in trauma treatment, we show how treatment focusing on whatever issue they are willing to address can simultaneously resolve their trauma symptoms"--