Child traumatherapy: Its role in managing the effects of trauma,loss, damaged attachment,and dissociation in children exposed to lethal urban community violence

Violence and its effects on children should be a pressing concern for clinicians, policy makers, and public officials. Urban violence assaults the minds and bodies of our children, resulting in troublesome and complex responses that have far-reaching implications for the future of society. This article highlights chronic post-traumatic and loss response patterns associated with the horrors of violence and murder witnessed by a child, and a model of intervention referred to as child traumatherapy.Since the problems presented by many inner city children are wide-ranging, to include attachment problems and dissociation, a multisystems approach transformed in practice into an intersystem approach may be required in many cases. This approach begins with a unisystem, then moves to multisystems, and later to coordinated intersystem service structures. This may be realized through the coordinative skills of the therapist who instrumentally brokers clinical-community services, while ensuring political leveraging for the benefit of children. In essence, the model is a comprehensive one which directly engages the child self system, the family-extended family systems, the community, the political system, while employing ethnoculturally enlightened methods. The model integrates techniques in play, cognitive, behavioral, social, and psychodynamic therapies, and highlights the indispensability of the use of transference to manage terror, horror, and resolve disturbed attachment. These and other issues will be presented in this article.