Category: Article

• Article

January 25, 2019

“Knowing is half the battle.” ~GI Joe You’ve seen the stressed-out family. Someone is crying, another is fidgeting and then there is the angry one! If only you could show the family how stressed they are and what was causing the stress. Well, now you can. At the Family Trauma Institute, we’ve found that knowing […]

• Article

December 29, 2018

High Parent Involvement is the Key to Your Trauma Treatment Success Without parent involvement in your trauma treatment, child relapse rates skyrocket. To prevent relapse, it is important to begin building relationships before you meet with the family. That is why the FST| Family Systems Trauma Model incorporates the Motivational Interview (MI) Call Technique. Sobering […]

• Article

November 25, 2018

There is an excellent story on the importance of knowing where to tap told by the late family therapist, Virginia Satir: After listening to the engineer’s description of the problems and asking a few questions, he went to the boiler room. He looked at the maze of twisting pipes, listened to the thump of the […]

• Article

November 11, 2018

What causes traumatized children and families to get stuck and unable to move forward? How can we change the outcome of impossible cases? Over a 30-year career in mental health, I’ve set forth to answer these questions. My personal quest began after my first major treatment failure when I received this message from a mother:  […]

• Article

October 26, 2018

Failure to Launch describes young adults who are struggling with the transition to adulthood. They have an inability to leave home and support themselves. This trend is reaching epidemic proportions. For example, a recent study cited in Psychology Today reported that 45 percent of young adults in the state of New Jersey between the ages […]

• Article

October 11, 2018

When we think of creating family legacies and preserving family traditions, we focus on positive connections and joyous occasions. But often joy is only part of the family story. Pain, while often ignored or even denied, can be passed down from generation to generation. This legacy of pain, coined Intergenerational trauma (IGT) after World War […]

• Article

August 17, 2018

On July 19, 2018, an amphibious vehicle, known as a duck boat, encountered a thunderstorm during a sightseeing tour on Table Rock Lake, near Branson Missouri. The boat sank, killing 31 passengers. For many of us, the event was only a blip on our radar. However, the families involved are left with ongoing emotional and […]

• Article

April 27, 2018

For the first time in more than two decades, suicide is killing more teenagers than homicide. Teen suicide is on the rise. Time Magazine reports that anxiety and depression is skyrocketing with an estimated 30% of girls and 20% of boys (about 6.3 million teens) have reported anxiety disorders and three million teens ages 12 […]

• Article

March 21, 2018

In the wake Parkland school shooting in February 2018, many stories focus on who to blame (more gun control, a broken mental health system, bad parenting, bad President, etc.) instead of how our mindset needs to change. Even Nikolas Cruz’s lawyer is jumping on the bandwagon as the central theme of his defense: Cruz’s lawyers […]

• Article

March 21, 2018

An interesting phenomenon occurred in our Family Systems Trauma (FST) research. If we began trauma treatment using a FST- Motivational Phone Call, a “soft start-up” took place. If not, “harsh start-ups” occurred. Harsh start-ups happened when the FST therapists began treatment using a traditional start (a phone call to simply schedule the first appointment). Within […]