Kenny E. Miller, ACSW, LCSW

Developmental Attachment-Based Psychotherapy (DAP)© is unique in that it is truly an attachment-based therapy in which each member of the dyad, both parent and child, receive a “relationship-based containment and rescue from overwhelming experience”. It provides an experience of “parallel process” for parent and child. We offer the same experience for parents and caregivers that we want them to offer their child. It is the deepest and most efficient way to work.

The initial stage of therapy is truly parent-focused. Most forms of “attachment therapy” currently practiced today with older victims of early neglect and abuse use the therapeutic time to focus on the child’s trauma, and support to parents for interventions during daily life and in the home is given 2nd priority. It is viewed as important and much time may be spent on it, but it is not the center of the therapist’s focus.

DAP seeks to give parents the emotional skills and tools to “be with” the child during and after experiences of emotional overwhelm. Ordinary stressors send the child plunging through the “Platform of Safety” multiple times each and every day. Co-regulation must precede self-regulation. What starts outside, goes inside. Without someone to contain, be with, and hold the connection to the valued parts of the child as well as parent, despite the child’s negative emotional outpouring, the child has no chance to integrate and learn about such emotions. They will remain “too big for me alone to handle” and stay split off, remain overwhelming without someone to help organize them for the child.

For the parent/caregiver the work is to stay connected to the valued and valuing parts of both themselves and their child, despite the negative intensity of the child. This is the deepest and most efficient way for the child to heal from the effects of their neglect and/or abuse. “I can stay connected to you, “be with” you and not lose the connection to my own worth as a parent, and not lose the part of me that values and treasures you."

Can you hold the connection to the valued and valuing part of both self and child in the face of the child’s overwhelmed state of mind, in the face of their negative and destructive behaviors, which can be extremely intense? It is daunting and challenging work which becomes the focus of therapeutic intervention and the focus of the relationship support provided for the parent by the therapist. Parents and caregivers receive support for the “parts of self”, often negative and split off parts of the parent, which the child’s behavior without fail evokes. Adrenalin evokes adrenalin. The child’s profound lack of safety inside is projected onto all those around them in these moments, often with a strong wish for destruction of both self and parent, with a strong feeling of the worthlessness of both self and caregiver for them. Without professional guidance and support it is very difficult not to lose the connection to the valued and valuing parts of both self and of their child, for the parent, in the face of these intense emotions.

To offer containment as well as connection: someone outside of me can hold this part of me in mind and still value me – now I can begin to put inside that ability to “be with” my own emotions, to begin to organize them more and more by myself, with your help. This experience of “interactive repair” is available to children at all levels of placement, including foster care, group home and residential settings. Child care workers and foster parents, themselves not necessarily permanent features in the child’s life, become available in this model to provide life-changing experiences of healing and repair to the child. In addition to the more traditionally viewed permanence that adoptive parents have provided, we can now make significant gains for children who have been viewed as lacking a permanent attachment figure.