This book presents an innovative and empathic approach to working with traumatized teens. It offers strategies for getting through to high-risk adolescents and for building a strong attachment relationship that can help get development back on track. Martha B. Straus draws on extensive clinical experience as well as cutting-edge research on attachment, developmental trauma, and interpersonal neurobiology. Vivid case material shows how to engage challenging or reluctant clients, implement interventions that foster self-regulation and an integrated sense of identity, and tap into both the teen's and the therapist's moment-to-moment emotional experience. Essential topics include ways to involve parents and other caregivers in treatment. ÿ

Our early attachment experiences with our primary caregiver influence the adult that we become. These experiences forge our patterns of communication, emotional experience, intimate relationships, and way of living in the world. If our early attachments are secure, we learn to access and communicate adaptive feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. In contrast, if our early attachment experiences are insecure, we may struggle with dysregulated, maladaptive emotions and have difficulties in our intimate relationships -- leading to anxiety, depression, and excessive or misdirected anger. This book presents an attachment-based approach to therapy that addresses the limiting and detrimental effects of negative early attachment experiences. Attachment-based psychotherapy has two major components: establishing a security-engendering therapeutic relationship and helping the patient to communicate more openly and thus to access more adaptive feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. Psychotherapists of various theoretical orientations will appreciate this book's richly detailed conceptualisation of common human problems, as well as clear treatment approach for addressing these problems.

This is a concise, accessible introduction to the basic principles of attachment theory, and their application to therapeutic practice. Bringing together 70 years’ of theory and research, its expert authors provide a much-needed user-friendly guide to attachment-informed psychotherapy. The book covers: The history, research base, and key figures and concepts of attachment theory The key concepts of attachment theory, and their implications for practice Neuroscience implications of attachment and its therapeutic relevance The parallels and differences between parent-child attachment and the therapeutic relationship The application of attachment in adult individual psychotherapy across a number of settings, also to couples and families The applications of attachment to working with complex disorders The applications of attachment in child psychotherapy

This eloquent book translates attachment theory and research into an innovative framework that grounds adult psychotherapy in the facts of childhood development. Advancing a model of treatment as transformation through relationship, the author integrates attachment theory with neuroscience, trauma studies, relational psychotherapy, and the psychology of mindfulness. Vivid case material illustrates how therapists can tailor interventions to fit the attachment needs of their patients, thus helping them to generate the internalized secure base for which their early relationships provided no foundation. Demonstrating the clinical uses of a focus on nonverbal interaction, the book describes powerful techniques for working with the emotional responses and bodily experiences of patient and therapist alike.

This practical book presents cutting-edge approaches to couple and family therapy that use attachment theory as the basis for new clinical understandings. Fresh and provocative insights are provided on the nature of interactions between adult partners and among parents and children; the role of attachment in distressed and satisfying relationships; and the ways attachment-oriented interventions can address individual problems as well as marital conflict and difficult family transitions. With contributions from leading clinicians and researchers, the volume offers both general strategies and specific techniques for helping clients build stronger, more supportive relational bonds.

Attachment theory and research have begun to specify the variety of therapist-patient interactions and the relation between the quality of these interactions and patient outcomes. The goal of this book is to contribute to our understanding of these interaction structures and t...

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.