Healing Parents

Taking our kids' behaviour personally stops us being the parents we need to be. So how do we become agents of healing? Listen in as therapist Catherine explores essential insights and steps to helping our kids heal.

Here's some more about her from her website:

Catherine Young, LMFT, is an author, trainer, consultant, clinical supervisor and child and family therapist. She has devoted over 25 years to helping children and families. She has worked in varied settings including public and private mental health agencies, children’s day treatment, children’s shelters, adoption agencies, early childhood mental health, and private practice.

Over the years Catherine developed a therapy model for working with some of the most challenging children and their families: Multi-Modal Attachment Therapy (M-MAT). She is excited to be sharing this model in her book, M-MAT Multi-Modal Attachment Therapy: An Integrated Whole-Brain Approach to Attachment Injuries in Children and Families.

She further applied the principals in M-MAT to attachment-based parenting. In her desire to bring healing to more children and families, she has recently authored a second book for parents: Understanding Attachment Injuries in Children and How to Help: A Guide for Parents and Caregivers.

Catherine Young currently provides training and consultation in attachment theory and therapy, attachment-based parenting and care, and related topics.

One of my first clinical jobs after graduate school was in a public mental health day treatment program for children 7 to 12 years of age. Many of these children were one step away from being removed from their homes due to their behavioral/emotional difficulties. Up to that point, the training I had received and the reading I had done in child therapy had been in non-directive play therapy and behavior therapy. I soon found that these children needed something much more. They needed more structure, more relationship focus, and more direction to help them move out of destructive patterns and cycles.

I went in search of more effective therapies...
 

...I have taken elements of attachment-based play, other attachment-based therapies, cognitive behavioral therapy, narrative therapy, play therapy, solution focused therapy and, I am sure, other therapy modalities that I have absorbed over the years, and brought them together in a new, organized and systematic approach that I have found very effective in reaching these very challenging children.

Because it needs a name, I call this approach Multi-Modal Attachment Therapy (M-MAT). I call it Multi-Modal Attachment Therapy simply because it integrates a variety of therapeutic modalities in a systematic way to treat children with significant attachment injuries.

I have watched children transform from detached, angry, aggressive, emotionally disorganized, sometimes bizarre, sometimes withdrawn beings into loving, happy, emotionally connected children. These children have historically been so challenging to treat that I have had parents tell me that other professionals have told them not to expect too much of their child; not to expect too much love, too much growth, too much connection from these injured children.

More at:

https://www.m-mat.org

 https://www.facebook.com/MultiModalAttachmentTherapy

Guests and the host are not (unless mentioned) licensed pscyho-therapists and speak from their own opinion only. Seek qualified advice if you need help.