Date of Award

August 2016

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Marriage and Family Therapy

Advisor(s)

Dyane K. Watson

Keywords

Clinician, Complex Trauma, Intuition, Post-Traumatic Growth, Therapeutic alliance, Trauma

Subject Categories

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

The following research study intends to explore one potential aspect of the

etiology of intuition in clinician populations, which is complex trauma. The relationship between early developmental trauma is ascertained through the Childhood Traumatic Events Scale (Pennebaker & Susman, 1988), which consists of events that respondents could report having experienced prior to the age of 17. Additional outcome measures that were given include the Post-Traumatic Growth inventory (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996), the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (Spreng et al., 2009) and the Types of Intuition Scale (Pretz et al., 2014). There were 28 participants, 23 of which reported one trauma or more and 16 with two or more exposures. There were 5 participants who reported having experienced no trauma prior to 17 years of age. Preliminary analyses were conducted between non-trauma (no trauma), trauma (1 or more traumatic experiences) and polytrauma (2 or more traumatic experiences) subgroups. It was hypothesized that clinicians with complex trauma histories (having experienced more than one traumatic event during childhood) would have heightened intuitive capacity; and that clinicians with trauma histories will have heightened intuition compared to clinicians without a history of trauma. Results indicate potential predictor variables of trauma exposure, intensity, and empathy yielding various types of intuition. One limitation within the research was a small sample size, which impacted the analyses conducted.

However, results show a correlatory trend to lend in future research addressing complex trauma and intuition in clinician populations or other.

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Open Access

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