Social bonds and emotion regulation: Critical resources for trauma recovery

This keynote focuses on the important role that social bonds have in mitigating the effects of traumatic exposures. The presentation explores the essential role of attachment processes in early life as the foundation and framework for understanding the functions of social bonds in community life to support survival, increase mastery and provide dynamic and continuously occurring emotion regulation of members of the community. These functions are particularly evident during times of traumatic stress and the presentation will provide several examples. Implications for treatment are discussed highlighting the need for expanding the conceptualization of interventions for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) beyond fear conditioning paradigms (reducing fear) to include a resource depletion and recovery model (increasing resources). A flexible multimodal team-based treatment approach which acknowledges the need to both decrease psychopathology and increase resources in traumatized patient populations will be proposed where treatment needs are identified and prioritized in a collaborative fashion by therapist and patient. Examples of successful implementation of multimodal models in fields such as child mental health and primary care will be presented. A potential benefit of such models is that they promote tailored and hopefully more effective treatments for PTSD, Complex PTSD and other heterogenous mental and physical health problems that are so commonly found in traumatized populations.

Conference

English

Marylene Cloitre

Cloitre, M. (2019, June). Social bonds and emotion regulation: Critical resources for trauma recovery. Keynote presented at the 20th EMDR Europe Association Conference, Krakow, Poland