Strategic Team Treatment for Attachment Therapy

STTAT - Here is some more info from the Wesselmann/Bruckner seminar. This is information about the method they use in treating RAD that they have found most effective. Anything I have added will be in blue.

• Assess family clinical needs:
• Individual therapy for parents is indicated when the child is a trigger (for bringing up past or current difficulties)
• Couples' therapy is indicated when attempts to co-parent the child with RAD have divided the couple.
• Psycho-education helps parents and children understand the beliefs and feelings driving the behavior
• "TIPS"-Trauma Informed Parenting Skills-Teaches new responses to help calm the reactive child and interrupt stuck patterns while maintaining boundaries.
• Emotional attunement facilitates attachment between parent and child.
• Trauma treatment for the child calms the child's dysregulated brain and changes negative beliefs, thus removing blocks to bonding.

PSYCHO-EDUCATION

• Psycho-education makes the illogical logical to the parent, siblings, AND to the child.
• The attachment-disordered child was raised in a chaotic, inconsistent and illogical world. The illogical behavior from the child collides with reason. Understanding and insight begins the path towards change.
• Psycho-education helps the parent depersonalize the child's behavior.
• Parenting tools are only effective in the hands of the regulated parent.

TRAUMA-INFORMED PARENTING SKILLS...The parent learns to respond effectively to the feelings and belief's UNDERLYING the child's behaviors. Instead of reacting to the behaviors themselves REGULATING the child's brain instead of escalating the dysregulation.

Attunement does not mean disregarding the need for limits, discipline and structure.

The therapist helps the parent find all resources available to begin the uphill work of change.

Tomorrow I'll write about EMDR. I hope you all made it through Christmas without to many blowouts. Now that Christmas is over I know my kids have already started calming back down to where they were before the holidays. Whew!