Course curriculum

  • 1

    Resources

    • Integrated Attachment Family Therapy Training Slides

    • Downloads

    • Recommended Reading List
  • 2

    Pre-Recordings

    • Foundations of Attachment Family Therapy

    • Attachment-Based Activities for Attunement, Trust, and Regulation

    • Facilitating Parent-Child Dialogues that Create Connection and Understanding

    • What Lies Underneath Difficult Child Behaviors & Working with Parents

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Join Dafna Lender, LCSW for this active, experiential program.

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Course Description

Too many children feel hurt, angry, and disconnected from their parents; and too many parents feel discouraged that their child-rearing approaches aren’t working. Many parent-child therapies focus on improving behaviors without looking at the core issues underneath: attachment and trauma. Parents may seek out help from a professional but get discouraged when the recommended interventions don’t work.

This workshop offers a different lens that focuses on the physiologic, nonverbal connection between parent and child to improve the relationship. Using principles from two attachment-based modalities---Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy and Theraplay---learn how to enhance regulation, connection, and joy between parents and children as well as guide parents to do reparative work around family trauma.

  • Get to the heart

    of a child’s deeper thoughts, feelings, wishes, and beliefs without relying on the child’s ability to verbalize with words

  • Facilitate active dialogue

    between parent and child that’s both safe and gets to their core issues

  • Learn gentle ways to intervene

    and redirect a misattuned or critical parent

  • Practice scenarios

    for de-escalating child and parent dysregulation, facilitate optimal arousal and affect regulation

Core Components of Integrated Attachment Family Therapy

  • Becoming aware of/practicing expression one’s own social engagement mechanisms

  • Awareness of one’s own attachment history and it may interact with client’s attachment history

  • Assessment of parent and child’s physiologic states

  • The ability to titrate/modulate stimulation to level that the child/parent can tolerate

  • Assisting in development of child’s coherent autobiographical narrative

  • Ability of parent to repair ruptures in relationship with child

  • Can provide techniques to set limits that are developmentally appropriate and trauma sensitive

  • Can identify when parent is in need of individual sessions to build trust with therapist

About Dafna

Dafna is an experienced international teacher and trainer, having offered a variety of workshops in 3 different languages: English, French, and Hebrew.

Learning how to organize our arousal, connect for coherence and calm, focus our attention, and tune into the sensations in our bodies can be supported, developed, and honed in childhood by attentive caregivers providing co-regulation through connection.

Caregivers can grow, nurture, and refine their own capacity to provide co-regulation for the children in their care. Co-regulation means intervening at the appropriate physiologic level to connect with a person and capture the “attention” of their whole body.

Learning Objectives

  • Describe the principles of Attachment Theory

  • List the areas of functioning that are affected by Complex Trauma

  • Describe the intervention of PACE

  • List 2 playful responses in a PACE dialogue

  • List 2 accepting responses in a PACE dialogue

  • List 2 empathic responses in a PACE dialogue

  • List 2 curious responses in a PACE dialogue

  • List 2 interventions for facilitating direct parent-child communication

  • List 3 steps in preparing parents for working in an attachment based model

  • Explain the condition of Blocked Care

  • List 2 possible reasons for a parent’s persistent defensive statements

  • List 2 techniques for regulating a parent’s emotions in a session

  • List 2 components of voice prosody

  • Describe the social engagement system