Trauma Focused Psychotherapy Essay

The authors wanted to know if trauma-focused psychotherapy was effective in counseling refugees that have suffered from trauma in war. The time length of this study was a year. Trauma-focused psychotherapy consists of a three-stage model of stabilization, focus of the traumatic event, and quality of life. The authors focused on participants that are Yugoslavia refugees that suffered from a three-year war that involved torture, rape, and genocide. In this study, these refugees age ranges from 18 to 61 and currently live in Germany. The authors used thirty-five participants that received trauma-focused psychotherapy and had a control group of thirty-five participants that did not receive trauma-focused psychotherapy but standard counseling. The progress of these participants was determined by their score on the posttraumatic stress disorder scale assessment and also a self-report on their symptoms. There were 67% of women and 23% of men that participated in this study. This study found that the participants that received trauma-focused psychotherapy scored lower on the posttraumatic stress disorder scale assessment and also self-reported that their symptoms have reduced compared to the …show more content…
The authors built trust with refugees who are often skeptical of the process by providing an emotional bond, empathy, and mutual respect. Building a relationship with a client that has trauma is important because they need to feel comfortable with their counselor in order to progress in therapy. I believe that this is a multicultural step because the authors acknowledge that there might be a lack of trust with refugees giving personal information to foreigners. I believe that they also covered my social justice concerns because they provided the participants with counseling in their own language because they were not able to speak German at a high level (Kruse et al.,