• Conduct comprehensive systemic family assessment to drive goal-directed treatment planning
• Partner with family to determine preference, readiness, and facilitate shared decision-making
• Design services to be accessible, flexible and individualized to families’ needs and circumstances
• Attend to family’s developmental status while being responsive to developmental needs of individual adult and child family members
• Mobilize family resources, i.e. nurturing relationships, protective skills, ability to maintain predictable routines and effective structure, communication/problem solving skills, social network, to support growth and recovery.
• Promote safety for all family members.
• Assess and address the multiple pathways along which exposure to chronic and acute stress impacts family systems
• Infuse trauma-informed family engagement strategies that reduce barriers to accessing treatment/services
• Recognize the family’s traumatic context to a.) enhance their capacity to navigate multiple systems in ways that minimize daily hassles, system demands, and social/public incivilities, and b.) assist them in arriving at a shared meaning of their trauma story.
• Educate the family on the impact of trauma on individual and family functioning.
• Recognize a range of possible traumatic responses including thriving, resilience, acute, post, chronic and complex traumatic stress.
• Optimize the strengths of the family’s cultural/ethnic backgrounds and religious or spiritual affiliations and beliefs to support recovery.
• Augment protective factors that reduce the adverse impacts of trauma exposure, limit future risk and promote well-being across the family system.
• Address impact of trauma work with families on providers and their systems.