Promoting Resilience Following Traumatic Brain Injury: Application of an Interdisciplinary, Evidence-Based Model for Intervention

With an increasing instance of traumatic brain injury and little advancement over recent decades in the rehabilitation of brain injury survivors and their family members, focus has shifted toward the establishment of effective whole-family resilience promotion interventions. Using the Brain Injury Family Intervention as a model, clinicians constructed two curriculum-based interventions grounded in resilience theory and drawing from the interdisciplinary approaches of neuropsychology and marriage and family therapy: (a) the Resilience and Adjustment Intervention, for individual survivors of traumatic brain jury, and (b) the Therapeutic Couples Intervention, designed to increase relational satisfaction in couples following a traumatic brain injury. The present study outlines the need for the integration of resilience tenets into rehabilitation techniques, summarizes the empirical justification for the use of an interdisciplinary approach, and offers an overview with implementation specifics regarding these two newly designed interventions.