• • • • • • •
615-293-3780
Adoptive/Foster Family Counseling
Adoptive and foster families face different challenges than traditional families, especially with children who have suffered neglect, abuse, or trauma; in fact, emotional, psychological, and behavioral difficulties are fairly common for children who have been adopted or in foster care. Oftentimes the root of these problems exists in the child’s attachment, or the specific way in which he or she relates to others. Habitually, attachment is formed within the first two years of life and subsequently dictates a person’s perception and interaction with others in intimate relationships. However, though the process may be difficult, attachment can change over time, both positively and negatively. This change is reliant on multiple relational experiences that have the collective strength to overpower a previous attachment. Understanding your own attachment, as well as your child’s, is crucial to understanding the reasoning behind your thoughts, emotions, and actions and will help you realize the ways in which you and your child are emotionally limited. You can then learn the skills necessary to improving your relationship with your child – disarming fear, negotiating conflicts, and nurturing security
in order to draw him or her into a healthier connection with yourself and others.
To achieve this, it is essential to create a space free from judgment that encourages acceptance and affirmation, removing defensiveness, so you can make sense of how each person’s previous experiences, relationships, and trauma might be affecting your entire family. I believe the most successful method for guiding this journey is Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI®), a holistic approach
that utilizes mind, body, and spirit in trauma-informed intervention. TBRI® is multi-disciplinary, flexible, and attachment-centered, specifically designed for children of neglect, abuse, and trauma of any kind and at any risk level. Fundamentally comprised of “best practice” research, the skills TBRI® cultivates assist caregivers in returning their child to a healthy developmental path.
If learning these skills are of interest
to you, I would be honored to work
with your family to help form a happier
and healthier family unit.
Testimonial:
“We would highly recommend Steve as a family counselor. My husband and I adopted a wonderful bright young boy age 6 from Ethiopia 19 months ago. We had read all the books and watched the video tapes by Dr. Karen Purvis and many others prior to bringing our son home, which were educational and helped in many ways with the initial transition. However, over the past three months we started to see some extreme behavioral issues and everything we tried was not working. We did not have the answers and knew we needed help. Steve took us through an intensified education and training on TBRI or Trust-Based Relational Intervention. Over the next few weeks we applied what we had learned and started to see significant improvements. We wish every parent would have the chance to experience this process, it is an investment that will last a lifetime.” -Adoptive Family
“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out.” –Robert Collier
