Banca de DEFESA: CRISTIANA RODRIGUES MARTINS

Uma banca de DEFESA de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : CRISTIANA RODRIGUES MARTINS
DATE: 29/09/2026
TIME: 16:00
LOCAL: Google Meet
TITLE:

Emotion-focused therapy in the context of racial
trauma: a proposal for clinical application with black adults.

 

KEY WORDS:

Keywords: racial trauma; racism; Emotion-Focused Therapy; emotional regulation; Black
adults.

PAGES: 125
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: Psicologia
SUBÁREA: Tratamento e Prevenção Psicológica
SPECIALTY: Programas de Atendimento Comunitário
SUMMARY:

Racial trauma constitutes a cumulative, chronic, and historically situated phenomenon,
produced by direct and indirect exposure to different forms of racism, with repercussions for
emotional experience, the body, relationships, and emotional regulation processes. Despite
growing scientific recognition of the phenomenon, conceptual and clinical gaps remain,
particularly regarding the understanding of its emotional processes and the incorporation of
this evidence into psychotherapeutic practice. Taking these facts into consideration, this
dissertation aimed to develop a contextualized proposal for the clinical application of a
protocol grounded in Emotion-Focused Therapy for the care of Black adults with experiences
of racial trauma, based on evidence from the scientific literature on racial trauma and
contributions from the philosophy of raciality. This is a qualitative, applied, exploratory, and
propositional study, developed through an integrative literature review, the elaboration of a
clinical application proposal, and a fictional clinical vignette designed to illustrate the
operationalization of the proposal. The integrative review, conducted in the PubMed, Scopus,
PsycINFO, Web of Science, and Virtual Health Library databases, identified 1,437 records, of
which 42 met the eligibility criteria. Bardin's content analysis resulted in 4 categories: racial
stressors associated with racial trauma; emotional responses; emotional regulation processes;
and protective and vulnerability factors. The findings evidenced the cumulative and chronic
nature of racial trauma, marked by fear, hypervigilance, anger, depressive distress, and
somatic manifestations, as well as by regulatory strategies whose functionality varies
according to context. Articulating these results with the philosophy of raciality and the
foundations of EFT made it possible to understand that strategies such as hypervigilance and
emotional suppression may acquire adaptive functions in racialized contexts of threat,
although their maintenance may produce suffering. The resulting clinical proposal preserves
the procedural architecture, markers, tasks, and change mechanisms of the protocol, not
proposing new techniques, but rather an expansion of the clinical formulation through situated
empathy, incorporating racialization experiences and their historical, social, and relational
conditions into the understanding of emotional processing. It is concluded that Emotion-
Focused Therapy offers consistent procedural foundations for the care of racial trauma when

suffering is understood without dissociating emotional experience from the contexts in which
it was constituted, avoiding the pathologization of survival strategies and favoring processes
of recognition, self-respect, belonging, and emotional transformation.

 

 

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1808252 - ANA CLAUDIA DE AZEVEDO PEIXOTO
Interna - 1765641 - LUCIENE ALVES MIGUEZ NAIFF
Interno - 1868924 - WANDERSON FERNANDES DE SOUZA
Externo à Instituição - MARCO AURELIO MENDES DA SILVA