Matching Interventions to Individuals
Helping Families Begins with Listening
Choosing the best way to help begins with careful listening in order to understand your specific situation.
We View Behavior as Communication
Often children don’t have the words to describe their experiences or feelings, so they communicate with their behavior.
Trauma-Focused Therapy
Sometimes children and teens need specific strategies and therapy related to trauma. Both trauma-focused CBT and EMDR are excellent modalities for helping a person to recognize, reduce, and resolve trauma triggers. When working with children, trauma work is often best done with a parent being part of the process.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing)
EMDR is a well-researched therapy that helps reduce trauma symptoms, such as troubling thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It reduces the child’s or teen’s triggers and helps them return to normal developmental tasks. EMDR is also effective for depression, anxiety, phobias, and a variety of other issues. It can also help a child heal from attachment trauma.
Attachment/Relationship Enhancement Therapy
Parents gain insight into their child’s behaviors and feelings by learning to conduct play therapy sessions under a therapist’s direction. According to research, when families participate in this form of therapy, the child’s problem behaviors decrease and the parents learn vital parenting skills for dealing with behavioral and emotional outbursts. Most important, parents and children develop a closer relationship.
PCIT (Parent Child Interaction Therapy)
PCIT is an is an evidence-based therapy for young children with behavior issues. PCIT involves “coaching” sessions in which the parent and child interact and play as the therapist observes. The parent uses a “bug in the ear” device and the therapist provides coaching in the moment as the parent manages his/her child’s behaviors. It has been found to decrease tantrums, negative attention-seeking behaviors, and parental frustration and increase the child’s compliance with adult requests.
TBRI (Trust-Based Relational Intervention)
TBRI is an attachment-based and trauma-informed therapy that is designed to help “children from hard places.” We’ve found it is very effective for children with less severe problems too. TBRI focuses on empowering principles, connecting principles, and correcting principles. It is based on years of attachment, sensory processing, and neuroscience research. TBRI’s overarching goal is strengthening connections and relationships.
Play Therapy
Play is the language of children; therefore play therapy is the most natural way to help children “play out” and through this work out, their problems or concerns. Research shows that play therapy is effective with children experiencing a wide variety of social, emotional, and behavioral problems, including anxiety, aggression, depression, ADHD, low self-esteem, peer problems, and post-traumatic stress.
Sandtray Therapy
Our sandtray therapy room is equipped with an extensive collection of miniature objects, and the child is encouraged to create his or her world. Images, dilemmas, fears, and hopes can be expressed in new ways as the child shares the experience with the therapist. The child can rework a situation in the sandtray and symbolically change the outcome. This therapy leads children to discover their own wisdom and pathway to healing.
Expressive Therapy
While children’s drawings, paintings, or clay creations convey information about their feelings, thoughts, and fantasies, it is the act of creating the art with the therapist present, and then processing it together, that encourages expression, growth, and understanding.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
Based on the idea that our inaccurate thoughts or beliefs lead negative moods and problematic behavior, the success of this well established is supported by research. It helps a child become aware of inaccurate thoughts and then view situations more realistically. This helps a child improve his/her behavior and view of things even if the situation doesn’t change.
Family Therapy
Even if it seems like only one family member is struggling, involving others in the family encourages useful solutions and support. Families also learn more beneficial ways of interacting and solving problems. We get to know your family’s philosophies, principles, and preferences and fit interventions into your style.
Positivity Therapy
Utilizing groundbreaking research, children and families learn how to overcome negativity and cultivate positive emotions. Building and broadening your child’s and family’s positivity helps increase joy, creativity, and well-being. It also helps children bounce back from life’s challenges. Because of its amazing affects, we include aspects of positivity with each family.