Trauma Systems Therapy for Children and Adolescents

Trauma Systems Therapy (TST) is a treatment model for traumatized children and their families with a specific framework that focuses intervention toward the state and context dependencies of clinical problems related to traumatic stress. Practitioners are guided to collect and appraise clinical evidence on episodes of uncontrolled emotion and behavior expressed by traumatized children to enable their accurate prediction on future occasions. Such prediction is enabled when the clinical data reveal the contextual conditions controlling the child’s expressions of such episodes. Knowledge of those contextual conditions reveals personalized intervention strategies aimed toward (1) decreasing a traumatized child’s exposure to contextual cues that are predicted to elicit uncontrolled emotion and behavior, and (2) increasing the child’s tolerance of such cues so that they can exert better control over their state of emotion and behavior. TST is delivered within three successive phases, depending on the level of acuity/risk of the child’s clinical problems, and is implemented within a defined organizational practice framework so that practitioners can be sufficiently supported to intervene to improve the lives of traumatized children and their families.