Innovative Practice in Forensic Settings : A Cognitive Analytic Approach to Effective Relational Work

This new Innovations in CAT title explores relational work in forensic services, arguing that rehabilitating offenders in a way that reduces future risk to others means first understanding the fundamentally relational nature of both trauma and offending.

Working in forensic services requires clinicians to deal with complex trauma on both a professional and personal basis. Professionally, they must care for and rehabilitate people who have not only experienced trauma but also behaved in traumatic ways toward others. And on a personal level, they are inevitably touched by this trauma – by reliving it in dialogue, or by observing its effects. A key challenge they face is to build strong therapeutic relationships with those for whom past relationships have faltered and often become incendiary. Innovative Practice in Forensic Settings explores issues of how to simultaneously hold in mind risk, safety and vulnerability, and how to maintain a capacity to think alongside a capacity to feel. Focusing on a relational and contextual understanding of trauma and offending, the chapters explore how to make use of a CAT approach across different forensic settings, clinical presentations and services.