Trauma-Organized Systems Physical and Sexual Abuse in Families

This book is about the experience of individuals who have been abused or who have abused others, but it also traces the way an abusive experience can organize a family or professional system so that changes are difficult to achieve.The authorhas been in the forefront of the child abuse field for many years, and he discusses in this volume the way his thinking has changed to incorporate the ideas from the feminist movement and the constructionist family therapists. He looks at the way victimizing actions and the traumatic effects of abuse combine to create a trauma-organized system, which includes the individual, the family, the professional helpers, the community, and the cultural values. The author describes the characteristics of these systems and a diagnostic procedure to help the workers plan the treatment.

Editors’ Foreword , Foreword , Introduction , The family as a violent institution: a sociological perspective , Family violence: explanatory models to describe violent and abusive families , Developing a social-interactional–systemic account of family violence , Family victimization processes and social-interaction explanations for family violence , A systematic account of the different trauma-organized systems in various forms of family violence , Trauma-organized systems: breaking the denial process by externalizing , A focal model to encompass the descriptions of the trauma-determined family system , Treating the trauma-organized system , The treatment process in trauma-organized systems

Arnon Bentovim