Lifespan Integration (LI)
Lifespan Integration is an effective and gentle technique for trauma therapists to use, especially with children who may not have words to verbalize their traumatic experiences. LI is a body-based therapy that combines active imagination, the juxtaposition of ego states in time, and a visual timeline of memories to facilitate a neural integration and rapid healing. The therapist will support clients in doing and saying helpful things to their younger self. This internal dialogue is used to strengthen internal attachment between the different aspects of self and prove to the younger self using the timeline that the traumatic event or circumstance is over. It is a gentle approach that provides deep processing without flooding or overwhelming the person. Lifespan Integration also prioritizes attachment relationships with specific protocols focused on attachment repair.
Observed Experimental Integration (OEI)
Observed Experimental Integration is a neurologically based series of trauma integrative techniques to reduce and resolve the impact of trauma. It involves observing the emotions, thoughts, memories, and perceptions that arise when alternately covering each eye, a process that has been found to aid in integration of unprocessed trauma. The approach helps to resolve painful or distressing signals from the body with three basic techniques with the eyes: Switching, Tracking and Glitch Massage. The goal is to integrate thoughts, feelings, sensations, or traumatic memory brining a strong connectedness between the two hemispheres of the brain. Adults, children and youth can benefit from this intervention by allowing experiences that were frozen in time to become ‘unstuck.’ Because it works on conscious and unconscious elements of experience change can often be rapid and long lasting.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is a structured therapy that encourages the person to briefly focus on the trauma memory while simultaneously experiencing bilateral stimulation. This bilateral stimulation can be facilitated with eye movements or handheld tappers. This experience results in the reduction of the intensity and emotion associated with the trauma memories. Unlike other treatments that focus directly on altering the emotions, thoughts and responses resulting from traumatic experiences, EMDR therapy focuses on the memory and is intended to change the way the memory is stored in the brain. This results in reducing or eliminating the corresponding symptoms associated with that memory. This can lead to tremendous relief from the impact of stored memories on daily functioning and emotional regulation.
When using EMDR therapy with children or youth we encourage a parent, guardian, or support person to be available to increase the feeling of safety and comfort. Bringing a safe person into the room allows children to feel more comfortable having one foot in the present and one foot in the past allowing them to reduce the intensity of their emotional experiences associated with early memories.
Watch, Wait and Wonder Intervention
Watch, Wait and Wonder is a child led psychotherapeutic approach that uses a child’s spontaneous activity in a free play format to enhance parental sensitivity and responsiveness, the child’s sense of self and self-efficacy, emotion regulation, and the child-parent attachment relationship. The approach provides space for the infant or child and parent to work through developmental and relational struggles through play. Also central to the process is engaging the parent to be reflective about the child’s inner world of feelings, thoughts, and desires, through which the parent recognizes the separate self of the infant and gains an understanding of her own emotional responses to her child. Because of the central role of the infant or child in the intervention and the relationship focus, Watch, Wait and Wonder differs from other interventions which tend to focus primarily on the more verbal partner, the parent. A Child’s Song has been using an adapted version of WWW for many years to enhance attunement in parent child relationships that have formed later in development. These adaptations allow for children up to the age of 11 or 12 to benefit from this intervention by using different materials in place of or in addition to toys.
Parent Child Attachment Developmental Intervention
This is a unique approach to supporting children and youth who have missed many developmental stages due to chronic stress, trauma, abuse, neglect, or significant losses. This intervention supports children, youth, and families in forming strong connections by addressing the lagging skills, missed experiences and unmet needs from earlier stages of development as the source of dysregulation and behavior struggles. Through the exploration of a child’s story from the beginning of their life until present day the therapist is able to help the child or youth along with their parent or guardian to identify the developmental stages where trauma interfered with development and make a plan of intervention that allows the child or youth to get their needs met, create opportunities for skills building, and recreate healthy relational experiences that were not available earlier in a child or youth’s life. This is a powerful healing opportunity for everyone involved and paves the way for viewing behaviors with empathy and curiosity.
Note: While some of our clinicians are trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy CBT and Dialectic Behavioral Therapy DBT and do incorporate elements of these interventions in their practise we do not specifically offer them independent of our trauma and attachment informed interventions.
