The following are the organizing principles of this model, and offer a clear blueprint for resolving attachment trauma in children:

#1    Children who have missed, for whatever reason, early developmental experiences of safety, connection and secure attachment now lack the "safety inside" themselves to both utilize ordinary parenting responses and techniques to grow themselves, as well as navigate their lives without continual experiences of overwhelm, meltdown and disruption, often from completely ordinary stressors.

#2    Though trauma may have been present in their lives, and we know indeed remains stored in their bodies, it is the lack of the relationship-based skills of early childhood that prevent them from being able to resolve these traumatic experiences. It is the lack of the "safety inside" that keeps those experiences overwhelming to them. They often lack the skills for example, to represent those experiences in words. They remain alone with them and lack the trust in adults to help them with those feelings that are too big for them alone to handle.

#3    This makes the first priority for therapy the learning of those relationship skills. This involves both assessing the child for the level of relationship skills they have available, and a parent-centered approach that focuses on changing the daily interactions between parent and child as a way of growing those skills and creating a secure base for the child.

#4    Three areas of focus represent the initial stage of therapy: 1) parent support for "being with" the child when disruptions, meltdowns or any break in the connection (loss of safety inside) occur (called "interactive repair); 2) interventions to grow the skills of self-parent permanence and self-parent constancy in the child; and 3) sensory-based experiences of shared joy and delight between parent and child.

#5    As well documented in the modality of therapy known as Theraplay, a modality whose roots are also in Object Relations theory, children remain hungry despite their chronological age, for the missed experiences of sensory-based interactions of delight and shared joy with their caregivers. This hunger remains locked in the body and no amount of neglect and abuse can change that. Finding the level their body enters the world with pleasure and sharing that with them is possible and the delight between parent and child is important to the healing process.

#6    Having now increased relationship skills, safety inside, and a secure base of trust in an attachment figure, children begin on their own and with our guidance to bring out the overwhelming experiences they have suffered. They now have both the skills inside, and the trust in attachment figures, to begin to organize, with our help, the overwhelming emotions of the trauma. This begins the second stage of therapy, when they can start to "be with" some of their trauma, to talk about what happened to them, and work more actively on it as a focus of intervention. They are now able to use more conventional modalities of trauma resolution because the attachment work of the first stage of therapy has given them the "safety inside" to "be with" the trauma.

The Bridge to Trauma Resolution

With repeated experiences of "being with" them during overwhelming states of mind, along with shared experiences of joy and delight, the child is able to put inside themselves a representation of the loving and available caregiver they never had. The child now experiences the "secure base" of a caregiver who they have learned through experience will help them with feelings which are too big for them alone.

Getting the missing relationship skills of early childhood (safety, self-regulation) inside NOW creates a "bridge" for the more normal symbolic and language-based ways which trauma can be resolved in children. Furthermore, when children reach blocks in their symbolic work on trauma we now understand: they lack the safety inside to "be with" the intensity of this material and we go back and strengthen the "safety inside" with skills work from these early years: interventions that strengthen self-parent permanence as well as constancy.