The Trauma-Informed Integrative Ecological Relational (TIER) Model: A Practice-Based Framework for Reception Systems Supporting Displaced Populations.

Reception systems for displaced populations function as primary psychosocial environments in which the conditions of daily life directly shape individual wellbeing, emotional regulation, and longer-term integration trajectories. Within international protection contexts, residents contend not only with past trauma and post-migration stressors but with conditions of adaptive uncertainty, defined here as the sustained demand to adjust psychologically, behaviourally, and relationally to unresolved and indeterminate life circumstances, most notably prolonged waiting for legal status determination. This condition is structurally embedded within reception systems through legal precarity, institutional dependency, and limited control over future outcomes, and may be further compounded by transfer or relocation between accommodation settings. The result is not a linear progression of recovery but fluctuating, non-linear patterns of distress, adaptation, and engagement. Despite growing recognition of trauma-informed practice within clinical and therapeutic domains, comparatively little attention has been given to its operationalisation across entire residential reception environments as integrated systems. This paper argues that fragmented, service-specific approaches are insufficient within contexts characterised by adaptive uncertainty and dynamic psychosocial need. In response, it presents the Trauma-Informed Integrative Ecological Relational (TIER) Model, a practice-derived framework developed within a large-scale reception centre supporting adult male international protection applicants in Ireland over a four-year period. The model conceptualises the reception environment as an active psychosocial ecology in which resident wellbeing, staff regulation, organisational structures, and community dynamics are shaped through relational field processes, understood here as the cumulative emotional, interpersonal, and institutional dynamics through which experiences of safety or threat are transmitted across the environment. Five interconnected operational pillars give the model its practical structure, operating simultaneously rather than sequentially in recognition of the non-linear nature of trauma-related experience. The paper outlines the model’s theoretical foundations, structural components, and practice-based observations derived from four years of operational experience. These do not constitute empirically validated findings; the model is presented as an empirically testable framework, drawing on person-centred, ecological, psychosocial, and polyvagal theoretical traditions, and locating the model within the therapeutic community tradition (Main, 1946; Jones, 1953; Rapoport, 1960), group analytic theory (Foulkes, 1948; Bion, 1961), and complex adaptive systems thinking (Stacey, 2001). The model’s scope is delimited to adult male applicants; applicability to other demographic contexts remains to be established through further research. Keywords: trauma-informed care, displaced populations, international protection, reception systems, adaptive uncertainty, relational field, distributed co-regulation, therapeutic community, group analytic theory, complex adaptive systems, psychosocial ecology, integration, asylum seekers, person-centred practice, ecological systems theory