Complementary Guidelines to Practice Guidelines for Clinical Treatment of Complex Trauma

Increasing numbers of therapists and health professionals from a range of disciplines are providing therapy to clients with complex trauma histories.

These Complementary Guidelines complement and support the Practice Guidelines for Clinical Treatment of Complex Trauma (2019) by specifying what the work requires and the relevant competencies.

The two sets of guidelines included in this publication are:

1. Guidelines to Differences between Therapy for Complex Trauma and Standard Counselling Approaches
and
2. Guidelines to Therapist Competencies for Working with Complex Trauma and Dissociation

The first short guidelines address the ways in which working with complex trauma clients require adaptation of common counselling principles. All modalities need to be trauma-informed but at a more basic level they consider the `taken-for-granteds’ of what is widely considered to comprise `good’ therapy.

The second additional short guidelines present therapist competencies for working with complex trauma and can be read as a prelude to the clinical guidelines.

Although the original (2012) and updated (2019) clinical guidelines convey what therapy for complex trauma clients entails, they do not specify the attributes and abilities the therapist needs. These guidelines fill this gap.