Navigating Co-Occurring Complexity: Integrating AOD, Mental Health, and Family Violence Responses
Tracks
Ballroom 2: In-Person Only
| Monday, November 23, 2026 |
| 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM |
| Ballroom 2 |
Overview
Tony Johannsen, Family Life
Three Key Learnings
1. Identify and articulate how differing approaches across AOD, mental health, and family violence assess and understand risk, responsibility, and pathways to behaviour change.
2. Apply trauma-capable and shame-sensitive approaches to engage individuals using family violence without collusion or minimisation, via a robust therapeutic alliance.
3. Integrate perspectives from AOD, mental health, and family violence to develop coherent, safety-focused responses that maintain accountability - identifying transferable treatment goals.
Speaker
Mr Tony Johannsen
Director Clinical Practice, Evidence & Quality
Family Life
Navigating Co-Occurring Complexity: Integrating AOD, Mental Health, and Family Violence Responses
Presentation Overview
AOD misuse, mental distress, and family violence frequently intersect in ways that challenge conventional understandings of risk, responsibility, and behaviour change. While each sector brings valuable perspectives, their underlying assumptions often diverge—particularly in how risk is assessed, accountability is maintained and behaviour change is conceptualised. These tensions can hinder responses to individuals who use violence, especially those with co-occurring experiences of trauma, substance misuse, and psychological distress.
This 60-minute workshop engages directly with these complexities, offering a clinically grounded exploration of competing frameworks and their implications for practice. Tony will examine how divergent paradigms of risk, responsibility, and harm can produce conflicting interpretations of the same presentation.
Drawing on psychodynamic theory, this session will consider how unconscious processes such as; attachment styles, defensive mechanisms, shame responses and trauma symptoms shape both, a person’s use of family violence and any potential resistance to interventions. Participants will reflect on how trauma-capable and shame-sensitive practice can deepen engagement without collusion or minimisation, and how a more integrated case formulation can hold complexity while maintaining clarity about harm, responsibility, accountability and behaviour change.
Through applied discussion and case-informed reflection, this workshop will highlight pathways for reconciling divergent approaches and supporting more coherent, effective responses across systems. Emphasis will remain on sustaining a safety-first lens—particularly for children—while strengthening practitioners’ capacity to navigate ambiguity, hold therapeutic tension, and support meaningful behaviour change in high-risk contexts.
This 60-minute workshop engages directly with these complexities, offering a clinically grounded exploration of competing frameworks and their implications for practice. Tony will examine how divergent paradigms of risk, responsibility, and harm can produce conflicting interpretations of the same presentation.
Drawing on psychodynamic theory, this session will consider how unconscious processes such as; attachment styles, defensive mechanisms, shame responses and trauma symptoms shape both, a person’s use of family violence and any potential resistance to interventions. Participants will reflect on how trauma-capable and shame-sensitive practice can deepen engagement without collusion or minimisation, and how a more integrated case formulation can hold complexity while maintaining clarity about harm, responsibility, accountability and behaviour change.
Through applied discussion and case-informed reflection, this workshop will highlight pathways for reconciling divergent approaches and supporting more coherent, effective responses across systems. Emphasis will remain on sustaining a safety-first lens—particularly for children—while strengthening practitioners’ capacity to navigate ambiguity, hold therapeutic tension, and support meaningful behaviour change in high-risk contexts.
Biography
Tony is a clinical leader in Australia’s community sector, recognised for innovation, trauma-capable practice, and clinical excellence. Beginning his career as an AOD forensic clinician, supervisor, and program manager, he built expertise in program design and systems reform aimed at treating co-occurring-complexities. After training as a Men’s Behaviour Change Facilitator, he expanded his forensic work with men to include family violence. He has since developed multiple programs and interventions emphasising personal responsibility, behavioural accountability, child safety, and relational repair. An existential psychotherapist and supervisor, Tony leads evidence-informed innovation as Director of Clinical Practice, Evidence and Quality at Family Life role.
