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Rethink Child Trauma Using Feedback Loops

 

Unhealed trauma can lead children to act out their wounds and create trauma for the whole family.  Parents feel hopeless and lost as their entire family experiences the effects of trauma.

One father shared: “As the dad, I am supposed to protect my child from hurt and pain. When my daughter started cutting on her arms with our kitchen knives, I was a deer in headlights. I didn’t know what to do.”

Feedback loops are a technique used by therapists to rethink child trauma through a family systems lens. This technique allows the trauma specialist to move the parents and other family members from a Precontemplative Stage of Readiness (i.e., “It is 100% a child only problem” or “Fix my child, I do not see that I am part of the problem or solution.”) to the Contemplative Stage of Readiness (i.e., “Seeing what you call a feedback loop suddenly gives me have new insight. It’s a family problem in which we all have to change”).

For more information on the feedback loop technique, visit familytrauma.com and join the Family Trauma Institute’s upcoming free webinar on July 24, 2018.

Scott P. Sells, Ph.D., MSW, LCSW, LMFT, is the author of three books, Treating the Tough Adolescent: A Family-Based, Step-by-Step Guide (1998), Parenting Your Out-of-Control Teenager: 7 Steps to Reestablish Authority and Reclaim Love (2001), and Treating the Traumatized Child: A Step-by-Step Family Systems Approach (2017). He can be contacted at spsells@familytrauma.com or through LinkedIn.

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