Guidelines

In 2012, Blue Knot Foundation released Practice Guidelines for Treatment of Complex Trauma and Trauma-Informed Care and Service Delivery. These nationally and internationally acclaimed guidelines were a global first in setting the standards for trauma specific and trauma-informed organisational practice.

Both the clinical and organisational guidelines have been updated for counsellors and therapists, and separately for organisations since. However the 2012 guidelines have been of interest to many survivors and those who support them.

Since 2019, Blue Knot has updated its trauma specific guidelines. These include updated Practice Guidelines for Clinical Treatment of Complex Trauma and accompanying Complementary Guidelines. The Complementary Guidelines include two sets of guidelines in a single publication: Guidelines to Differences between Therapy for Complex Trauma and Standard Counselling Approaches and Guidelines to Therapist Competencies for Working with Complex Trauma and Dissociation.

Although these publications are mainly for professionals who are supporting people with complex trauma experiences in counselling or therapy, they can be of interest to survivors and those supporting them as well.

Subsequently it launched its Practice Guidelines for Identifying and Treating Complex Trauma-related Dissociation.

Although this publication is aimed at counsellors and therapists, many survivors and those supporting them are interested in understanding more about dissociation.

In 2020 Blue Knot released a set of guidelines to support supervisors of practitioners working clinically or providing trauma specific support i.e. Guidelines for Clinical Supervisors of Therapists who Work with Complex Trauma and Dissociation. This set of guidelines is included here for completeness.

In 2021, Blue Knot updated its trauma-informed guidelines for organisations: Organisational Guidelines for Trauma-Informed Service Delivery.

These guidelines for services are of interest as they highlight the developments for services in providing trauma-informed services to people engaging with them.

Also in 2021 Blue Knot has developed trauma-informed guidelines for the disability sector. These include Blue Knot Guidelines for Trauma Informed Practice: Supporting people with disability who have experienced complex trauma and Plain English Guide: Supporting people with disability who have experienced complex trauma.

The guidelines have a broad audience including carers, advocates, support workers and organisations. The Plain English Guide is directed at support workers.