Trauma-Informed Custody Evaluations
Jennifer Harrison, Psy.D., ABPP, ATR-BC
Trauma has become an increasingly visible concept in family law, and that visibility is warranted. But visibility without precision creates its own risks. When every stressor becomes a trauma, and every behavior becomes a symptom, the framework loses its clinical utility, and when the framework is rejected outright, genuine suffering goes unnamed. This one-hour webinar presents a trauma-informed, rather than trauma-led, approach to custody evaluation: rigorous, individualized, and evidence-based. We will distinguish a traumatic event from a traumatizing experience, locate trauma on the differential alongside developmental, relational, and systemic factors, and introduce a stepwise decision-making model for organizing information, generating multiple hypotheses, and sequencing interventions. Particular attention will be given to parent-child contact problems, including the distinction between trauma-driven refusal, scaffolding collapse (the Bridge to Nowhere), and parental alienating behaviors.
$15 for AFCC members