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Healing Connections is an essential guide for professionals and caregivers working with children who have complex needs stemming from early trauma, losses, and involvement in the child welfare system. This updated resource builds on prior foundational knowledge to deliver contemporary tools and practices tailored to today's diverse families, including foster and adoptive families. By incorporating insights from a wide range of experts, the book reflects a multi-systemic approach that addresses collective trauma and the crucial role of belonging and community in healing. Aligning with the latest evidence-based practices, Healing Connections emphasizes the importance of staying informed about recent research and advancements in the field. Whether you're a caregiver or a professional supporting children and youth, this book provides valuable knowledge and practical resources to enhance your understanding and effectiveness. Healing Connections aims to enlighten and equip you with essential strategies to foster healing and growth in children facing significant challenges.
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Adopted children who have suffered trauma and neglect have structural brain change, as well as specific developmental and emotional needs. They need particular care to build attachment and overcome trauma. This book provides professionals with the knowledge and advice they need to help adoptive families build positive relationships and help children heal. It explains how neglect, trauma and prenatal exposure to drugs or alcohol affect brain and emotional development, and explains how to recognise these effects and attachment issues in children. It also provides ways to help children settle into new families and home and school approaches that encourage children to flourish. The book also includes practical resources such as checklists, questionnaires, assessments and tools for professionals including social workers, child welfare workers and mental health workers. This book will be an invaluable resource for professionals working with adoptive families and will support them in nurturing positive family relationships and resilient, happy children. It is ideal as a child welfare text or reference book and will also be of interest to parents. Buy on Amazon
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Arthur G. Mones In Transforming Troubled Children, Teens, and Their Families: An Internal Family Systems Model for Healing, Dr. Mones presents the first comprehensive application of the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy model for work with youngsters and their families. This model centers diagnosis and treatment around the concept of the Functional Hypothesis, which views symptoms as adaptive and survivalbased when viewed in multiple contexts. The book provides a map to help clinicians understand a child’s problems amidst the reactivity of parents and siblings, and to formulate effective treatment strategies that flow directly from this understanding. This is a nonpathologizing systems and contextual approach that brings forward the natural healing capacity within clients. Dr. Mones also shows how a therapist can open the emotional system of a family so that parents can let go of their agendas with their children and interact in a loving, healthy, Self-led way. This integrative MetaModel combines wisdom from Psychodynamic, Structural, Bowenian, Strategic, Sensorimotor, and Solution-Focused models interwoven with IFS Therapy. A glossary of terms is provided to help readers with concepts unique to IFS. Unique to this approach is the emphasis on shifting back and forth between intrapsychic and relational levels of experience. Therapy vignettes are explored to help therapists address issues such as trauma, anxiety, depression, somatization, oppositional and self-destructive behavior in children, along with undercurrents of attachment injury. Two detailed cases are followed over a full course of treatment. A section on Frequently Asked Questions explores work with families of separation and divorce, resistance, the trajectory of treatment, dealing with anger, linking to twelve-step programs, and much more. This is an ideal book for any therapist in quest of understanding the essence of healing and seeking therapeutic strategies applied within a compassionate framework. Buy on Amazon
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Helen Worrall, Sian Templeton, Netty Roberts, Ann Frost, Kim Golding, Eleanor Durrant, Jane Fain, and Cathy Mills Emotional difficulties in children aged 5-11 can display themselves in a range of different behaviours, and it is important for staff in schools to be able to identify and address these problems, and to provide appropriate help. This easy-to-use tool provides an observation checklist which enables staff to identify behavioural patterns in children with social and emotional difficulties, analyse the emotional difficulties underlying these behaviours and establish what kind of help and support the children need. Behavioural responses are categorised within clearly outlined topics, including behaviour, play and relationship with peers, attachment behaviours, emotional state in the classroom and attitude to attendance. Checklists and diagrams identify different 'styles' of relating (secure, avoidant, ambivalent), to help school staff who work with children and their families to respond appropriately to the individual needs of each child. A range of handouts include activities designed to provide emotional support, to focus and regulate behaviour and enable the child to develop important social and emotional skills. Suitable for use with children aged 5-11, this tool will be an invaluable resource for teachers, teaching assistants, learning support staff, school counsellors and educational psychologists. Buy on Amazon
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Ana M. Gomez This is the first book to provide a wide range of leading-edge, step-by-step strategies for clinicians using EMDR therapy and adjunct approaches with children with severe dysregulation of the affective system. Written by an author internationally known for her innovative work with children, the book offers developmentally appropriate and advanced tools for using EMDR therapy in treating children with complex trauma, attachment wounds, dissociative tendencies, and compromised social engagement. The book also presents the theoretical framework for case conceptualization in EMDR therapy and in the use of the Adaptive Information Processing model with children. Principles and concepts derived from the Polyvagal Theory, affective neuroscience, attachment theory, interpersonal neurobiology, developmental neuroscience and the neurosequential model of therapeutics, which can greatly support and expand our understanding of the AIP model and complex trauma, are presented. The text also offers an original and pioneering EMDR therapy-based model to working with parents with abdicated caregiving systems. The model is directed at assisting parents in developing the ability for mentalization, insightfulness, and reflective capacities linked to infant's development of attachment security. A unique and innovative feature of this book is the masterful integration of strategies from other therapeutic approaches, such as Play therapy, Sandtray therapy, Sensorimotor psychotherapy, Theraplay and Internal Family Systems (IFS), into a comprehensive EMDR treatment maintaining appropriate adherence to the AIP model and EMDR therapy methodology. Buy on Amazon
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Art Becker-Weidman Grounded in attachment theory and trauma, Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP) is an evidence-based, effective, and empirically validated treatment for complex trauma and disorders of attachment. This manual for the practice of DDP will give therapists, educators, and child welfare and residential treatment professionals the tools necessary to help children who have a history of neglect, abuse, orphanage care, or other experiences that may interfere with the normal development of attachment between parent and child. Becker-Weidman looks at the importance of a comprehensive and thorough assessment as the basis for treatment planning and explains in detail the main elements of DDP, including intersubjectivity, emotionally based dialogues, narratives, and co-regulation of emotions and meaning, as well as illustrating these elements through detailed case examples and dialogue. Dr. Becker-Weidman then looks at how the various principles, methods, and techniques of DDP are differentially used in each stage of treatment. A section on parenting outlines how therapists can train caregivers in attachment-facilitating parenting approaches. This book will serve as a treatment manual for DDP and will provide directly useful material for practicing therapists. In addition, the text will be useful in graduate courses on treatment, child welfare, family therapy, and child psychology. Buy on Amazon
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Art Becker-Weidman This collection of transcripts from sessions by certified Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapists gives therapists, educators, and child welfare and residential treatment professionals a detailed understanding of how Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy is used to help children who have a history of neglect, abuse, orphanage care, or other experiences that may interfere with the normal development of attachment between parent and child. The book begins with a description of DDP, its essential components, and the ways in which those components are used differentially in different phases of treatment. The transcripts that follow illustrate those components and their uses. They cover a diverse range of clients and families so that the reader can appreciate the depth and breadth of DDP. Both the editor and the therapists themselves provide analysis and commentary on the therapists' goals, impressions, and techniques. This book complements the treatment manual Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy: Essential Methods and Practices, and will be useful in graduate courses on treatment, child welfare, family therapy, and child psychology. Buy on Amazon
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Mary D. Salter Ainsworth, Ph.D. Buy on Amazon
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Edited by Lisa Berlin, Yair Ziv, Lisa Amaya-Jackson, Mark Greenberg Synthesizing the latest theory, research, and practices related to supporting early attachments, this volume provides a unique window into the major treatment and prevention approaches available today. Chapters address the theoretical and empirical bases of attachment interventions; explore the effects of attachment-related trauma and how they can be ameliorated; and describe a range of exemplary programs operating at the individual, family, and community levels. Throughout, the authors consider cross-cutting issues such as the core components of effective services and appropriate outcome measures for attachment interventions. Also discussed are policy implications, including how programs to enhance early child-caregiver relationships fit into broader health, social service, and early education systems. Buy on Amazon