Weaving Safety into the System: Trauma, Neurobiology and Systemic Family Therapy

As family therapists, we are trained to think in systems, to look beyond the individual and consider the complex interplay of relationships, contexts, meaning making, and patterns. But when we are working with families who’ve experienced adversity and trauma, we also need to be thinking about nervous systems, not just family and broader systems. Trauma-informed care asks us to do both.

In this blog, let’s reflect on how trauma-informed principles and neurobiological insights can deepen and enrich systemic family therapy, helping us to be more effective in the service of our clients. Consider these ideas as perspectives from an integrative systemic family therapist passionate about brain-aware, trauma-informed, relational practice.

We will explore how understanding neurobiology including polyvagal theory (PVT), mirror neurons, interpersonal neurobiology, affect attunement, and the brain’s stress response can guide us in building safety, shaping interventions, and supporting healing in ways that honour both the individual and the relational.  This is important because every individual is a system embedded within broader systems, and each person’s neurobiology is inextricably linked with those they are in relationship with, and influenced by their context, both past and present, including past relationships and intergenerational influences.

What is important as a systemic integrative practice is considering neurobiology in ways that are not reductionistic and not focusing on medical model understandings that privilege intrapsychic, individual approaches and lenses.  In the words of Hanna, it is helpful to be “learning about science in a way that complements the art of therapy.”  Systemic integrative practice involves keeping a systemic lens with the “helicopter view” as we bring together the science of different knowledge paradigms and approaches with the art of helping people, families, and systems.

What is Trauma-Informed Care—and Why Does It Matter for Family Therapy?

Trauma-informed care is an approach grounded in understanding the widespread impact of trauma and the potential paths for recovery and growth. At its core, it shifts the question from “What’s wrong with a person?” to “What happened to a person?”, and, crucially, “What did that person learn to do to survive?”  For more on this shift, a great read is the book by Dr Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey titled “What Happened To You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing.”

In systemic family therapy, trauma-informed care invites us to go one step further and mentalize the family by asking questions like:

• “What has happened to this family?” 

• “What has happened in past generations?” 

• “What is the family’s context?” E.g., have they experienced racism, classism, or other forms of discrimination? Is this a family impacted by poverty and a lack of access to resources?

• “How has adversity and trauma shaped the relational patterns, family structures, family narratives, survival strategies, and emotional climates in this system?”

• "What are the strengths, resources, and sources of resilience?"

Trauma-informed practice helps to understand:

• Adversity and trauma are prevalent.  In Australia, 1 in 5 children have been exposed to 3 or more ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences) which include experiences of e.g., violence, abuse, neglect, witnessing violence at home, instability due to parental separation or incarceration of a parent.  In addition to the ACEs we need to consider the impacts of racism, discrimination and poverty.

• Trauma is not just in the story.  It’s in the nervous system/s.  Trauma affects how people show up in relationships, how they read cues, how they manage proximity, and how they tolerate emotional intensity. That’s why understanding neurobiology matters from a systemic perspective.

Why a Neurobiological Lens is Helpful

Neurobiology gives us a map to understand the embodied experience of trauma. Key insights include:

• Polyvagal Theory (PVT) teaches us that safety is not just the absence of threat, but the presence of connection. A client might be physically safe but still in a state of autonomic defence (fight, flight, or shut down).  And different family members may be in different states at different times.

• Mirror neurons help explain how emotional states are contagious within families, and also within sessions. A dysregulated caregiver’s distress can be caught by a child and vice versa.  And, a regulated therapist can model calm presence that families begin to mirror.

• Affect attunement reminds us that our moment-to-moment emotional responsiveness builds trust and helps co-regulate nervous systems. Attunement builds the bridge to safety.

  
  

When we are trauma-informed and neurobiologically aware, we notice not just the content and process of a session but also the state the family members are in. We ask: Is this family in a neurobiological state where connection, reflection, and change are possible? What can I do to support this?

“Family members who demonstrate safety in the therapeutic context with one another tend to be emotionally expressive and vulnerable; they ask each other for feedback, encourage openness,

and disclose thoughts, feelings and memories that may never

before have been shared.”

Escudero & Friedlander, 2017

How Trauma-Informed Practice Integrates with Systemic Family Therapy

Systemic family therapy and trauma-informed care are not separate paradigms; they are deeply compatible.

• Systemic therapy asks us to notice patterns, relationships, meaning-making, stories, and the way problems are maintained or resolved within a system.

• Trauma-informed care asks us to hold space for consideration of a person’s context and notice what states people are in when these patterns and stories happen, and what nervous system capacities are available in those moments.

  
  

Trauma can shift people out of their window of tolerance (see Dr Daniel Siegel) and reduce their circle of capacity (see Cathy Malchiodi), resulting in survival strategies.

Survival strategies are often relational: withdrawal, blame, parentification, aggression, silence, appeasement. They show up in family systems as problematic patterns, but they started as solutions.  Bringing a trauma-informed lens allows us to de-pathologise these patterns and work with compassion, curiosity and a strengths focus. It also helps us pace our interventions thoughtfully and intentionally for a tailored approach.

Neurobiological Considerations at Each Stage of Systemic Family Therapy

“At every moment, we are engaged in this

brain-to-brain creative dance.”

Badenoch, 2008: 21

Let’s look at how we can bring trauma-informed, brain-aware thinking into each stage of systemic practice:

1. Creating Safety and Building the Alliance

Neurobiological Focus: Engaging the social engagement system (PVT - ventral vagal), supporting co-regulation, assessing nervous system readiness.

Before change is possible, safety must be established, not just cognitive safety, but felt safety. It’s not enough to tell someone they are safe; the nervous system needs cues of connection.

• Be predictable, warm, and attuned in tone and rhythm.

• Speak slowly, allow pauses, soften eye contact, and orient your body in an open way.

• Normalize physiological responses: "When things have been overwhelming, your body might still be in alert mode."

• Use grounding or co-regulating exercises early on (e.g. paced breathing, orienting to the room, Safe Place exercise).  For more information about the Safe Place exercise visit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHaGXGdq9KA

Safety is not just about not retraumatizing. It’s about creating enough calm in the room that connection and curiosity can emerge.  Attunement and attention to neurobiology assist with this.

“Attunement is experienced as an authentic sense of connection, as “feeling felt” by the other person (Seigel, 1999).  It requires presence and attention so that the right brain of the therapist can feel the right brain of the client (Schore, 2014, 2019).”

Beaudoin & Monk, 2024: 73

It is important to keep in mind though that this isn’t some kind of formulaic technique done “to” a client.  We need to embody a deep care and respect in our way of being to do this authentically and compassionately.

2. Collaborative Goal Setting and Contracting

Neurobiological Focus: Left-right hemisphere integration, tolerable pace of emotional arousal, shared decision-making to promote agency.

Collaborative contracting gives the family control over what will happen and when.  This is helpful as regaining a sense of control is critical for people who have experienced trauma and the systems surrounding them where power and predictability were absent.  Here’s some ideas for what this might look like in session:

• Invite each family member to describe what felt safety means to them.

• Use metaphor (a right-hemisphere language) to build shared understanding, e.g. “Are we in a place where we can start moving upstream or do we need to build a safer boat first?”

• Check for readiness: “Does this feel like something we can talk about today, or do we need to build in more support and connection first?”

“The right brain is heavily involved with the experience of

intense emotions in most people and luckily is also very sensitive

to the felt experience of another caring person available to

regulate the dyad’s joint affective level (Ogden, 2021; Schore, 2014, 2019; Siegel et al., 2021)”.

Beaudoin & Monk, 2024: 74

3. Choosing the Intervention and Pacing Change

Neurobiological Focus: Working with (not against) autonomic states; using a staged approach when needed.

The Leeds Family Therapy & Research Centre Manual describes two broad change pathways:

• Narratives: Change via insight and understanding (reflective, meaning-making)

• Cybernetics: Change via new experience (relational enactment, action-oriented)

Weaving neurobiology into therapy can “boost the work” in either pathway, e.g., in narrative therapy

“People’s lives are so rich and multidimensional that drawing attention to experiences easily remembered, through physiological and embodied descriptions, can greatly enhance access to preferred experiences of identity.”

Beaudoin & Monk, 2024: 23

But if the amygdala is in overdrive and the prefrontal cortex is offline, new meanings and insights won’t stick, and an active approach to changing patterns and structures may overwhelm.  So, what do you do?  Weaving neurobiology into therapy might also look like “staging” therapy, with a block of sessions for a regulation intervention first to address stuck cycles, structures, and meanings perpetuated by the impacts of trauma, including neurobiological dysregulation.

Here are some questions to help consider how to approach change as understood from the Leeds Family Therapy Manual through a neurobiological lens:

Cybernetics:

• How is neurobiology contributing to patterns?

• What neurobiological intervention could help create space for a new belief and/or perturb a pattern?

Narratives:

• How is neurobiology contributing to unhelpful and/or stuck stories?

• What neurobiological intervention could open up space for a new story or meaning?

Here’s an example of how a staged approach might look:

• Stage 1: Regulation-focused work

  • Use psychoeducation, body-based grounding, emotional literacy, mapping triggers, and family-based co-regulation practices.

  • Work on reducing system-wide arousal, not solving the deepest issues yet.

• Stage 2: Pattern Disruption and Reflective Change

  • Once a sense of stability is present, bring in enactments, circular questioning, re-authoring conversations, or genogram exploration.

  • Use reflection and narrative practices that integrate left-right hemisphere processes.

    
    

A staged approach is consistent with Babette Rothschild’s ideas on safety and stabilization first and foremost.

For more ideas on how change happens integrating the theory of change with a neuroscience twist download this infographic:

Theory of Change and Neurobiology_DrLeonieWhite.pdf

Download PDF • 303KB

Practical Examples in Session

Let’s break this down a little more into what being neurobiologically informed might look like in a session:

• In a parent-child dyad where the child appears shut down, observe tone and posture. You might say: “I wonder if this feels a bit fast right now—maybe we need to go slower and help everyone’s bodies feel more settled before we keep talking?”

• When a parent is in a defensive or critical mode, reflect the nervous system state rather than content alone: “It sounds like this is coming from a place of real urgency or fear for your child. Let’s just pause and breathe for a moment so we can get curious together.”

• If the system escalates during enactment, slow down: “Let’s press pause. I think we’ve just stepped into something really big—can we orient to the room for a moment, take a breath, and see if we can rejoin in a steadier way?”

Final Thoughts: Trauma-Informed Systemic Practice is Holistic and Compassionate Work

As systemic family therapists, we hold the paradox: we honour the whole system, and we attune to each nervous system. We work with what’s said and unsaid. We look for patterns, try to understand meanings, and we attune to and support emotional states.

Bringing a trauma-informed lens into systemic work doesn’t mean we become trauma therapists per se. It means we become more attuned, more flexible, more compassionate in our pacing, and more confident in weaving safety into every layer of the work.  Because when people feel safe in their bodies and in their relationships they’re more able to think clearly, reflect, and have a go at doing things differently, or understanding things differently.

Let’s keep integrating ideas to create spaces where individuals and families feel understood, supported, and steady enough to make meaningful change; spaces that are informed by what we know about the brain, the body, and the power of relationships.

Leonie

Dr Leonie White

Clinical Family Therapist and Psychologist

Director Phoenix Family Therapy Academy

Helping people grow, connect and thrive in life’s unique journey.

Please note - this article is educational in nature and does not constitute therapy advice. 

Please seek help from a professional if you require support. 

Photo Attributions:

All photos are from Canva Pro and Vecteezy Pro

References:

Beaudoin, M. N. & Duval, J (eds) (2017).  Collaborative Therapy and Neurobiology: Evolving Practices in Action.  Routledge: New York.

Beaudoin, M. N. & Monk, G. (2024).  Narrative Practices and Emotions: 40+ Ways to Support the Emergence of Flourishing Identities.  WW Norton: New York.

Gehart, D. R. (2024).  Mastering Competencies in Family Therapy: A Practical Approach to Theories & Clinical Case Documentation.  Cengage: Australia.

Hannah, S.M. (2014). The transparent brain in couple and family therapy: Mindful integrations with neuroscience. New York: Routledge.

 Perry, B. & Winfrey, O. (2021).  What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing.  Pan MacMillan: London.

Porges, S. (2022a).  Polyvagal theory: A science of safety.  Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227/full

Pote, H., Stratton, P., Cottrell, D., Boston, P., Shapiro, D. & Hanks, H. (2000).  Leeds Systemic Family Therapy Manual.  Leeds Family Therapy and Research Centre: Leeds. www.leeds.ac.uk/lihs/psychiatry/landt/lfrtc-research.html

Rothschild, B. (2004).  Applying the brakes.  Psychotherapy in Australia, 10(4), 60 - 63.

Rothschild, B. (2010).  Eight Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery:  Take-charge Strategies to Empower Your Healing.  WW Norton and Company: New York.

Siegel, D. (1999). The Developing Mind. New York: Guilford Press.

White, L. (2020).  Creating Relational Safety in an Emotional Storm.  Phoenix Family Therapy Academy.  https://www.phoenixftacademy.com/post/creating-relational-safety-in-an-emotional-storm