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Comprehensive Interventions to Foster Resilience in Children with Complex Trauma

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Handbook of Resilience in Children

Abstract

Childhood adversity is considered one of the greatest epidemiological threats to our global youth community, and one of the most salient shapers of adult outcomes. The influence of developmental trauma on youth outcomes is multidimensional and transactional, as children must adapt to the complex demands of individual, cross-generational, and societal experiences. For many trauma-exposed youth, development is impacted in critical ways across domains, with youth developing a wide range of emotional, behavioral, and relational adaptations that lead to complex presentations transcending diagnostic categories and influencing risk for an array of negative outcomes over time. A key role of intervention with children and adolescents who have experienced traumatic stress is therefore the cultivation of core domains of development which are impacted by traumatic stress, and which in turn predict most strongly to resilient outcome. In this chapter, developmental trauma and its impacts on youth development are briefly described and defined, and trauma treatment is reframed as the work of cultivating resilience. Core targets of intervention are delineated, including building a range of external supports and resources, addressing caregiver needs and skills, supporting youth regulation, and enhancing key developmental capacities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Trauma Training, Inc., Needham, MA, USA

    Margaret E. Blaustein

  2. Justice Resource Institute, Thompson, CT, USA

    Kristine M. Kinniburgh

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  1. Margaret E. Blaustein
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  2. Kristine M. Kinniburgh
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Correspondence to Margaret E. Blaustein .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Sam Goldstein

  2. Department of Psychology, McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Needham, MA, USA

    Robert B. Brooks

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Blaustein, M.E., Kinniburgh, K.M. (2023). Comprehensive Interventions to Foster Resilience in Children with Complex Trauma. In: Goldstein, S., Brooks, R.B. (eds) Handbook of Resilience in Children. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14728-9_15

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