Your kid was just sexually assaulted, or you just learned about abuse that took place years ago, and your kid is reliving all of it because they’re suddenly describing it to child welfare investigators, detectives, and doctors. Maybe their emotions and behavior are all over the place and you know they need something to anchor them through this storm. Maybe they’re keeping up with all their responsibilities, but you can feel a fierce unspoken demand to keep far far away from the topic of the abuse.
Through brief, early-intervention trauma therapy, I help kids recover from traumatic events occurring within the past 2-3 months (including recent disclosures of older abuse).
These therapies meet kids in the immediate aftermath of something awful, helping them understand what’s happening in their bodies and minds and signaling to their nervous systems that the threat is no longer in charge.
Typical human threat-response goes like this:
Perceive a threatening or unfamiliar situation
Quickly activate a survival strategy (e.g., fight, flight, freeze, fawn)
Notice that threat has been handled
Return to baseline
But, what if that survival strategy wasn’t enough?
When those quick reactions can’t contain the threat, we feel overwhelmed. That’s when stress tips over into trauma.
In early intervention therapy, we communicate with your kid’s nervous system in language it understands to let it know:
- You are physically safe
- The threat isn’t active right here, right now
- You are not alone
- You can do things to make this situation better
Early intervention trauma therapy helps:
Protect time and space. During the crisis stage, pulling a therapist onto your team carves out predictable moments to exhale, connect with your kid, and deal with feelings, when so much of your time, energy, and mental space is otherwise occupied responding to the larger crisis.
Relieve symptoms. Symptoms can get better. Your kid should feel some relief, even after just a few sessions.
Prevent disorders. In many cases, early intervention can help keep Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other longer term negative after-effects of trauma from taking hold.
Give direction. Even when more therapy is needed after a brief intervention, the early work is not wasted. We are all learning d and by the end of the brief intervention, we’ll have a much better idea of where the next step needs to take us.
I offer two distinct research-backed models of early intervention trauma therapy for kids and teens in Rockville, MD:
Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI)
| Specs | Might be a good fit if |
| – Ages 7-18 – Start within 6 weeks of the incident – 5-8 active sessions + intake and follow-ups | – You and your kid have a pretty strong relationship, but you’re not communicating very well about the recent incident. – You and your kid want some very concrete tools to use when thoughts, feelings, and body reactions related to the incident start interrupting the rest of life. – You and your kid do well with highly structured, shared child-parent sessions. – Your kid absolutely does not want to talk about the abuse. |
Read more information on CFTSI at the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. Or, set up a free consultation to find out if it could work for your kid.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Recent Traumatic Events Protocol (EMDR-RTEP)
| Specs | Might be a good fit if |
| – Ages 5+ – Start within about 12 weeks of the incident – 1+ active sessions + intake and follow-ups | – You and your kid have a pretty good toolkit of coping strategies, but they’re clearly still struggling with the recent events. – Your kid will benefit from flexibility in determining if sessions will be child-only or shared child-parent sessions. – Your kid is open–or even really wants to–make sense of what happened. |
Read more information on EMDR-RTEP at the EMDR International Association’s (EMDRIA) website. Or, set up a free consultation to find out if it could work for your kid.