Clinical Guidelines

These 2019 updated Clinical Practice Guidelines present evolving research and clinical insights around complex trauma. They build on the 2012 Practice Guidelines for Treatment of Complex Trauma and Trauma Informed Care and Service Delivery and include substantial additions around the nature of complex trauma, dissociation and the related clinical challenges, phased therapy, ‘new’ and emerging treatment approaches and issues relating to `evidence-based’ treatment. As happened in 2012, again in 2019, and prior to publication, Blue Knot’s updated Practice Guidelines have been extensively nationally and internationally endorsed.

Increasing numbers of therapists and health professionals from a range of disciplines are providing therapy to clients with complex trauma histories. These Complementary Guidelines complement and support the Practice Guidelines for Clinical Treatment of Complex Trauma (2019) by specifying what working with complex trauma clients requires and the relevant competencies needed by practitioners to do the work. The two sets of guidelines included in this publication address the ways in which working with complex trauma clients require adaptation of common counselling principles as well the competencies therapists ideally acquire for doing this work.

Complex trauma-related dissociation underlies diverse presentations to health professionals and is often not detected. This means that many people with complex trauma experiences, and who dissociate as a result, do not receive appropriate responses and care. These guidelines are for clinicians who work in a range of roles, come from different disciplines and have received diverse training but who want to enhance their ability to recognise and work with people experiencing complex trauma-related dissociation. These guidelines include information about working across the whole continuum of dissociation including with Dissociative Identity Disorder.