The FOCUS Family Resilience Program: An Innovative Family Intervention for Trauma and Loss

This article describes the core principles and components of the FOCUS Program, a brief intervention for families contending with single or multiple trauma or loss events. It has been administered nationally to thousands of military family members since 2008 and has been implemented in a wide range of civilian community, medical, clinical, and school settings. Developed by a team from the UCLA and Harvard Medical Schools, the FOCUS Program provides a structured approach for joining with traditional and nontraditional families, crafting shared goals, and then working with parents, children, and the entire family to build communication, make meaning out of traumatic experiences, and practice specific skills that support family resilience. Through a narrative sharing process, each family member tells his or her story and constructs a timeline that graphically captures the experience and provides a platform for family discussions on points of convergence and divergence. This narrative sharing process is first done with the parents and then the children and then the family as a whole. The aim is to build perspective‐taking skills and mutual understanding, to reduce distortions and misattributions, and to bridge estrangement between family members. Previous studies have confirmed that families participating in this brief program report reductions in distress and symptomatic behaviors for both parents and children and increases in child pro‐social behaviors and family resilient processes.     

Applying a Family Resilience Framework in Training,Practice, and Research: Mastering the Art of the Possible

With growing interest in systemic views of human resilience, this article updates and clarifies our understanding of the concept of resilience as involving multilevel dynamic processes over time. Family resilience refers to the functioning of the family system in dealing with adversity: Assessment and intervention focus on the family impact of stressful life challenges and the family processes that foster positive adaptation for the family unit and all members. The application of a family resilience framework is discussed and illustrated in clinical and community‐based training and practice. Use of the author's research‐informed map of core processes in family resilience is briefly noted, highlighting the recursive and synergistic influences of transactional processes within families and with their social environment. Given the inherently contextual nature of the construct of resilience, varied process elements may be more or less useful, depending on different adverse situations over time, with a major crisis; disruptive transitions; or chronic multistress conditions. This perspective is attuned to the diversity of family cultures and structures, their resources and constraints, socio‐cultural and developmental influences, and the viability of varied pathways in resilience.     

Cultural unconscious in research: integrating multicultural and depth paradigms in qualitative research

Culturally focused research has gained momentum in many disciplines, including psychology. However, much of this research fails to pay attention to the unconscious dynamics that underlie the study of culture and culturally influenced human beings. Such dynamics may be especially significant when issues of marginalization and oppression are present. Therefore, this paper seeks to contribute a framework for understanding cultural dynamics, especially unconscious cultural dynamics, within depth psychological qualitative research influenced by Jungian and post‐Jungian scholarship. Inquiry that is approached with a commitment to making the unconscious conscious seeks to empower and liberate not only the subject/object studied but also the researchers themselves. Following a brief review of multiculturalism in the context of analytically informed psychology, this paper offers several case examples that focus on researchers' integration of awareness of the cultural unconscious in their study of cultural beings and topics.     

Like a Fish Out of Water: Reconsidering Disaster Recovery and the Role of Place and Social Capital in Community Disaster Resilience

In this paper we draw on the findings of a critical, multi-sited ethnographic study of two rural communities affected by a wildfire in British Columbia, Canada to examine the salience of place, identity, and social capital to the disaster recovery process and community disaster resilience. We argue that a reconfiguration of disaster recovery is required that more meaningfully considers the role of place in the disaster recovery process and opens up the space for a more reflective and intentional consideration of the disorientation and disruption associated with disasters and our organized response to that disorientation. We describe a social-psychological process, reorientation, in which affected individuals and communities navigate the psychological, social and emotional responses to the symbolic and material changes to social and geographic place that result from the fire's destruction. The reorientation process emphasizes the critical importance of place not only as an orienting framework in recovery but also as the ground upon which social capital and community disaster resilience are built. This approach to understanding and responding to the disorientation of disasters has implications for community psychologists and other service providers engaged in supporting disaster survivors. This includes the need to consider the complex dynamic of contextual and cultural factors that influence the disaster recovery process.     

Spatialising skin: Pushing the boundaries of trauma geographies

By focusing on the somatic qualities of trauma this paper addresses emotion and affect as a means to link together trauma's spatial, physical, subconscious and psychosocial dimensions. Its aim is to extend theoretical discussion on spatially located affectual moments of trauma by utilising the concept of skin. Skin is used here as a metaphorical and theoretical framework for examining ideas of boundaries and containment. A container is a deceptively simple idea but requires constant maintenance. Trauma, however, often threatens to spill over the boundaries of containers exposing the fluidity of boundaries both theoretical and material. Close attention is paid to the psychoanalytic idea of skin to extrapolate how trauma draws in ideas of surfaces and abjection. In some ways abjection exposes the fragility of borders, how they can be threatened from both without and within. When working across the skin, an examination of what bodies do in both the post-disaster environment (Christchurch) and in relocated spaces (Waikato) is undertaken to illuminate the theoretical premises of this work. People move toward others in order to share their experiences, thus, trauma is encountered as both: individual and social, interior and exterior, incorporating body and psyche rather than separating the terms.     

Intersectional Trauma-Responsive Care: A Framework for Humanizing Care for Justice Involved Girls and Women of Color

ABSTRACT

Previous scholarship around intersectional frameworks and theories of gendered pathways has provided an invaluable lens in which to view women’s contact with the justice system. The current theory builds from this scholarship, and sets forth an Intersectional Trauma-Responsive Framework that explicitly considers the intersection of identities, including gender and race/ethnicity, under a trauma responsive umbrella. This framework underscores the interconnection between traumatic experiences and justice system contact, while also considering broader systems of oppression and societal disadvantage that impact girls and women of color. The framework encourages interventions and programming with justice involved girls and women and advocates for humanizing care in order to address women’s incarceration.     

A tale and its tale

Once upon a time there was a little girl who had woken from a sleep so deep that it had lasted many moons”. Drawing on first generation post-war experiences in Germany, I construct a fairy tale in which I begin to trouble silences surrounding familial and national historiographical lacunae. With such tales positioned on the threshold of conscious experiences and embodied unconscious knowledge, I reflectively draw on psychoanalytic theory to consider silences as reminders of uncanny returns of what has been suppressed.     

Meta-awareness and the involuntary memory spectrum: Reply to Meyer,Otgaar, and Smeets (2015)

In their commentary, Meyer, Otgaar, and Smeets (2015) raise several important issues about the definitions, characteristics and applications of various involuntary cognitive phenomena. Here we respond to the comments of Meyer et al. in ways that we hope will advance understanding of these issues, and inform future research. In particular, we have focused on the characteristics of involuntary phenomena—particularly in relation to meta-awareness—and the clinical relevance of mind-wandering.     

Trauma symptoms,temperament traits,social support and the intensity of pain in a Polish sample of patients suffering from chronic pain

The aim of the current study was to investigate the relationship between the intensity of pain, treated as the explained variable, and the level of trauma symptoms, as appear in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), temperament traits postulated by the Regulative Theory of Temperament and aspects of social support among patients suffering from chronic pain (arthritis and low-back pain). To assess the intensity of pain among participants we used the Numerical Rating Scale (NRS-11). The level of trauma symptoms was assessed with the PTSD Factorial Version inventory (PTSD-F). Temperament was measured with the Formal Characteristics of Behaviour – Temperament Inventory (FCB-TI). Social support was tested with the Berlin Social Support Scales (BSSS). The results of our study suggest that significant predictors of pain intensity among chronic pain sufferers were trauma symptoms. We also noticed that some temperament traits (i.e., emotional reactivity) increased the level of global trauma symptoms, which, in turn, intensified the level of pain. In addition, we showed that global trauma symptoms decreased the support participants actually received.