1st Edition
Personalising Trauma Treatment Reframing and Reimagining
Personalising Trauma Treatment is about helping trauma victims back to their old selves and focuses on altering the perception of the centrality of the trauma.
In this book, clients are taught to rediscover their sense of self by reframing the trauma. Within this new framework the focus is on the client’s mental time travel from the trauma to today and reimagining their future. The therapeutic targets are the thoughts and images (cognitions) that interfere with day-to-day functioning. It does not assume that arrested information processing lies at the heart of the development of PTSD, with a consequent need for the client to re-live the trauma. For those clients who were abused in childhood, their experiences are viewed through a particular central window, but other ‘windows’ may make for more appropriate engagement with their personal world and a reimagining of their view of themselves. Treatment delivery options from telephone consultation, group work and videoconferencing are discussed. With illustrative examples, the author highlights the pathway to recovery for a wide range of clients with the comorbidity often found in real-world settings.
The book will be essential reading for therapists and other mental health professionals working with trauma survivors.
PART ONE Distilling A New Direction; 1. Client’s Complaints Post-trauma; 2. Making Sense of The Client’s Response; 3. What Works for Whom In Routine Practice?; 4. Do Treatments Work for the Supposed Reason?; 5. A New Paradigm; PART TWO Applying The Centrality Framework; 6. Re-visiting The Implications of The Trauma; 8. When The Trauma Highlights A Pre-existing More Pernicious Problem; 8. The Client’s Account Is Not Necessarily Veridicial; 9. Capitalising On The Client’s Credible Model of Persuasion; 10. Forsaking The ‘Warzone Glasses’ For Pre-Trauma Specs; 11. A Marked Target?; 12. The Amplification of Vulnerability; PART THREE Managing the Crises That Can Derail Trauma Treatment; 13. Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder; 14. Weathering The Pandemic; 15. From One War Zone to Another?; PART FOUR Disseminating Trauma Treatment; 16. Groups Post Trauma; 17. Therapeutic Competence
Biography
Michael J. Scott is a Consultant Psychologist, and author of 13 books, including an edited 4 volume work on ‘Traumatic Stress’ and a self-help book ‘Moving On After Trauma’. He divides his time between treating clients, medico-legal work and writing.
Dr Scott offers a unique and refreshing perspective on working with those affected by trauma, particularly when they don’t neatly fit into a PTSD ‘box’ but have nevertheless come to be defined by their experiences. Taking a critical eye to evidence-based practice, and at turns thought-provoking and light-hearted, he combines up-to-date theory and clinical pearls with a robust critique of the modern realities of service delivery. He presents the first practical guide to implementing event centrality theory into a personalised, restorative CBT therapy with idiosyncratic formulation at its heart. Full of rich clinical examples and dialogue that brings the reader into his therapy room, he takes you step-by-step through his clinical decision making and interventions. He demonstrates how to combine rigorous diagnostic practice with a humane, respectful and personalised therapeutic style, helping people rebuild, restore and redefine themselves outside of their traumatic experiences, and in so doing reclaim their future selves from their past. An immensely useful guide for working with traumatised patients, you will find ideas, metaphors, stories, techniques, materials, and resources that you will return to time and again. Highly recommended! -- Sharif El-Leithy, Principal Clinical Psychologist, Traumatic Stress Service
In Personalising Trauma Treatment: Reframing and Reimagining Dr Scott delivers an approach to treatment grounded in pragmatism and real-world functioning. After considering the pitfalls of poor assessment he guides the reader through the process of detailed and accurate diagnosis questioning whether treatments work for the supposed reasons they give. He then introduces a range of evidence-based techniques that allow the client’s sense of self identity to remain central to the therapy process. Dr Scott especially considers the role of IAPT and the limitations IAPT protocols impose on the effective care of clients which goes to the heart of treatment effectiveness and in doing so presents a rational for Restorative CBT in returning the client back to being themselves again. This book is a must for all IAPT & CBT therapists, counsellors and clinical psychologists involved in the care of individuals suffering with trauma. -- Sundeep Sembi, Consultant Clinical Neuropsychologist, Psychology Chambers Ltd
Motherhood, apple pie, … improving access to psychological therapies? Whereas IAPT satisfies an NHS England mental health policy aspiration, it fails traumatised individuals in its organisational objective. Improving Access too often denied by administrative barrier, simplistic assessment, and lengthy delay. Psychological Therapies too frequently limited off-the-shelf, performed inadequately and/or incompletely, and with markedly differing outcome objectives for individual and service. Michael Scott identifies the paradox, coolly critiques the evidence, and illustrates and emphasises the collaborative and crucial role of the creative, empathic, and restorative therapist in enabling the client’s natural resilience and preferences for today and tomorrow, without pathologizing normality, imposing supposed processing, and unconstrained by complacent diktat. -- Greg Wilkinson formerly: Editor, The British Journal of Psychiatry and Professor of Liaison Psychiatry, The University of Liverpool; currently: Consultant Psychiatrist, Liverpool University Dental Hospital and Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
