Born out of the excitement of a convergence of ideas and passions, this book provides a synthesis of the work of researchers, clinicians, and theoreticians who are leaders in the field of trauma, attachment, and psychotherapy. As we move into the third millennium, the field of mental health is in an exciting position to bring together diverse ideas from a range of disciplines that illuminate our understanding of human experience: neurobiology, developmental psychology, traumatology, and systems theory. The contributors emphasize the ways in which the social environment, including relationships of childhood, adulthood, and the treatment milieu change aspects of the structure of the brain and ultimately alter the mind.

Christina Reese has dedicated her life's work to helping those with trauma cope to live healthier, happier, and more fulfilling lives. In her newest book, Trauma and Attachment, she has created a resource to guide clients from a place of fear, anxiety, and trauma to healthy attachment. In this comprehensive yet accessible book, Dr. Reese provides an attachment framework for treating clients who have experienced a multitude of traumas, ranging from abuse and neglect to medical traumas, natural disasters, and exposure to violence. Through a variety of worksheets, exercises, and activities, this book provides clients with the tools they need to develop a foundation for healing so they can find feelings of safety and security within relationships again. Inside, clinicians will find tools to help clients heal from the impact of: - Abuse by helping them establish safety and security within relationships. - Neglect by teaching them to find their voice and express their needs. - Medical trauma by helping them adjust to a new normal and better tolerate uncertainty. - Natural disasters by using mindful grounding techniques to navigate sensory triggers and cultivate mind-body awareness. - Witnessing violence by restoring clients' sense of felt safety and helping clients identify what they can control to keep themselves safe.

Trauma-Attachment Tangle offers informative and inspiring clinical stories of children who have complex trauma and attachment issues from experiences such as adoption, hospitalization, or death of a parent. Some of these children display puzzling or extreme symptoms like prolonged tantrums, self-hatred, attacking their parents or being fearful of common things like lights, solid foods or clothing. Dr. Lovett presents strategies for unraveling the traumatic origins of children’s symptoms and gives a variety of tools for treating complex trauma and for promoting attunement and attachment.

Trauma can have a significant impact on the stability of a child's development and can put additional pressures on the education staff working with them. Showing you how you can best support children who have experienced adverse childhood experiences, this guide is full of practical guidance on how you can adapt your teaching with this group. Covering a range of issues a child may have, such as foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, pathological demand avoidance, attachment difficulties and many more, this book provides the trauma-informed tools you need to care for these children and to give the best possible opportunities from their education. It also addresses the difference children may experience in learning, how they behave, how teachers can ensure home--school cooperation, and how teachers can act in a trauma-informed manner.

This collection of original articles by leading specialists in child development brings together work from diverse backgrounds and disciplines to establish, for the first time, the importance of the preschool period (eighteen months to four years)for parent-child attachment relationships. Balancing theoretical, research-oriented, and clinical papers, Attachment in the Preschool Years provides valuable data and approaches for those working in a wide range of fields, including developmental psychology and psychopathology, child psychiatry, family therapy, pediatrics, nursing, and early childhood education. "There is a wealth of information and thought in this book; it does not have a weak or uninteresting chapter, starting with the Preface by Emde, and as a whole, it forms a sort of seminar."—John E. Bates, Contemporary Psychology

From the founder of DDP, this updated and comprehensive guide is the authoritative text on DDP. DDP is an attachment-focused treatment for children and adolescents who experience abuse and neglect and who are now living in stable foster and adoptive families. Its central interventions are influenced by enhanced knowledge about the structure and functions of the brain, as well as the latest findings regarding developmental trauma and the related attachment problems it brings.

This book brings together the latest knowledge from attachment research and neuroscience to provide a new approach to treating trauma for therapists from different professional disciplines and diverse theoretical backgrounds. The field of trauma suffers from fragmentation as brands of therapy proliferate in relation to a multiplicity of psychiatric disorders. This fragmentation calls for a fresh clinical approach to treating trauma. Pinpointing at once the problem and potential solution, the author places the experience of being psychologically alone in unbearable emotional states at the heart of trauma in attachment relationships. This trauma results from a failure of mentalizing, that is, empathic attunement to emotional distress. Psychotherapy offers an opportunity for healing by restoring mentalizing, that is, fostering psychological attunement in the context of secure attachment relationships-in the psychotherapy relationship and in other attachment relationships. The book gives a unique overview of common attachment patterns in childhood and adulthood, setting the stage for understanding attachment trauma, which is most conspicuous in maltreatment but also more subtly evident in early and repeated failures of attunement in attachment relationships.

Integrating the latest in attachment theory and research into the use of EMDR. Much has been written about trauma and neglect and the damage they do to the developing brain. But little has been written or researched about the potential to heal these attachment wounds and address the damage sustained from neglect or poor parenting in early childhood. This book presents a therapy that focuses on precisely these areas. Laurel Parnell, leader and innovator in the field of eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), offers us a way to embrace two often separate worlds of knowing: the science of early attachment relationships and the practice of healing within an EMDR framework. This beautifully written and clinically practical book combines attachment theory, one of the most dynamic theoretical areas in psychotherapy today, with EMDR to teach therapists a new way of healing clients with relational trauma and attachment deficits. Readers will find science-based ideas about how our early relationships shape the way the mind and brain develop from our young years into our adult lives. Our connections with caregivers induce neural circuit firings that persist throughout our lives, shaping how we think, feel, remember, and behave. When we are lucky enough to have secure attachment experiences in which we feel seen, safe, soothed, and secure—the “four S’s of attachment” that serve as the foundation for a healthy mind—these relational experiences stimulate the neuronal activation and growth of the integrative fibers of the brain. EMDR is a powerful tool for catalyzing integration in an individual across several domains, including memory, narrative, state, and vertical and bilateral integration. In Laurel Parnell’s attachment-based modifications of the EMDR approach, the structural foundations of this integrative framework are adapted to further catalyze integration for individuals who have experienced non-secure attachment and developmental trauma. The book is divided into four parts. Part I lays the groundwork and outlines the five basic principles that guide and define the work. Part II provides information about attachment-repair resources available to clinicians. This section can be used by therapists who are not trained in EMDR. Part III teaches therapists how to use EMDR specifically with an attachment-repair orientation, including client preparation, target development, modifications of the standard EMDR protocol, desensitization, and using interweaves. Case material is used throughout. Part IV includes the presentation of three cases from different EMDR therapists who used attachment-focused EMDR with their clients. These cases illustrate what was discussed in the previous chapters and allow the reader to observe the theoretical concepts put into clinical practice—giving the history and background of the clients, actual EMDR sessions, attachment-repair interventions within these sessions and the rationale for them, and information about the effects of the interventions and the course of treatment.

Fostered and adopted children can present major challenges resulting from unresolved attachment issues and early traumatic experiences. In this much-needed book, the contributors provide a variety of complementary perspectives on the needs of these children and their families, focusing on ways of integrating attachment theory and developmental psychology into effective practice. Examining multiple aspects of work with children who are unable to live with their birth families, the book includes contributions on the assessment, preparation and support needs of children and families, attachment and the neurobiological effects of trauma, effective management of contact with birth families and developmental challenges in school settings. The use of creative arts therapies, alongside developmental reparenting strategies as part of a long-term attachment therapy `package', are explored in some detail. A fictionalised family, used as a working example throughout Part 2, brings practical interventions to life: illustrating the Family Futures' inclusive approach, where adoptive and foster parents become pivotal members of the therapeutic team. In addition, contributions from real-life user families illustrate some of the challenges they face and demonstrate how the developmental attachment-based approach has worked for them. Bringing together a rich and innovative selection of ideas for adoption and fostering practice across the disciplines, this book will be a valuable resource for all involved in supporting substitute families.

The essence of "plain old therapy," according to Jon G. Allen, is a mindful relationship between the patient and a trusted clinician who recognizes and understands the patient's trauma and connects with the nature and magnitude of his or her suffering. In Restoring Mentalizing in Attachment Relationships: Treating Trauma With Plain Old Therapy, Allen, a clinical psychologist with widely respected expertise in trauma, makes a research-based case for the virtues of the healing relationship created and nurtured through traditional psychotherapy. Though in recent years therapy has become just one of many treatment options for posttraumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related illnesses, the author argues that it remains the best. The book provides a conceptual framework for treating trauma patients and illuminates relationship factors that are empirically associated with positive outcomes. Patients who have suffered broken and dysfunctional attachments will benefit from its emphasis on trust, compassion, and true connection. Mental health clinicians of diverse theoretical orientations -- be they psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers, in training or practice -- will benefit from its emphasis on what works, as will their patients.