I have received training and completed a two year residency with the Gil Institute for Trauma Recovery and Education and am happy to bring this specialized training to Page County.
In addition to Person Centered, Cognitive-Behavior, and Reality Therapy perspectives with adults, the Expressive Therapies are particularly helpful with children and adolescent therapy.
The clinician is trained in the following specialized assessment and treatments:
The Extended Play-Based Developmental Assessment (EPBDA, Gil) consists of meeting individually with youth, allowing them to become comfortable with the setting and therapist. This therapeutic assessment may be concluded between 8 and 12 sessions and includes clinical observation, children’s participation in a variety of play-based activities, attention to and interpretation of thematic material in children’s play, completion of paper-pencil tests, if appropriate, and therapeutic dialogues.
The EPBDA has shown to be particularly useful for very young children who are less verbally expressive, for hesitant or ambivalent children who may feel compromised by demands for verbal communication, and for adolescents who may be unable or unwilling to verbally participate in an assessment or therapy.
Trauma-Focused Integrated Play Therapy, developed by Eliana Gil, is relationship-based and utilizes principles of child-centered play therapy in order to:
- allow children to self-direct;
- give children an experience of control and mastery; and
- permit children to access natural healing mechanisms such as post-trauma play.
By giving children opportunities to work in a permissive setting, clinicians observe and document how children utilize gradual exposure, gain an understanding of traumatic experiences, discharge affect, and begin to manage experiences that can feel overwhelming or frightening. This service is offered in 12 individual sessions (once weekly) to children and adolescents with a history of trauma. The TF IPT curriculum is administered by clinicians with specialized training and experience in trauma-informed therapies, to include completion of Dr. Eliana Gil’s TF IPT training intensive.
The Assessment of Sexual Behavior Problems in Children (ASBPC) consist of meeting individually with young and school-age children (ages 4-12) and allowing them to become comfortable with the setting and therapist. Assessments can last from four to six individual 50-minute sessions.
Initially, clinicians do not ask children direct questions about their problem sexual behaviors. Instead, clinicians utilize a nondirective approach to gain an understanding of the child’s overall functioning with particular attention to ways in which their sexual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors compare to their same-age peers.
Clinicians encourage children to externalize their thoughts, perceptions, and feelings by providing them with a variety of ways to symbolize and/or verbalize their sexual experiences and behaviors. Clinicians are trained to identify thematic material in children’s play that might suggest their underlying concerns. The initial goal of the ASBPC is to gain an understanding of children’s unique functioning, identify problem areas, rule clinical symptoms in or out, understand children’s perceptions of their important relationships, and subsequently develop recommendations that meet the specific needs of children and their families. In addition, this assessment allows clinicians to explore sexual behaviors contextually and address the treatment needs of the child and his/her family.
For children referred for Boundary Project (family-focused treatment of sexual behavior problems in children under the age of 12 years), the ASBPC is recommended in order to help determine whether Boundary Project’s structured program is a good fit for the child and his/her family at the time of the referral.
Boundary Project is an evidence-informed, family-focused treatment program for children ages 4 to 12 years who present with sexual behavior problems. This is an attachment-focused, integrative treatment model that includes attention to safety issues, supervision concerns, individual risk factors, trauma histories, and familial factors that may underlie the atypical or problematic sexual behaviors.
Clinician’s utilize cognitive-behavioral therapy, expressive therapies, mindfulness meditation, and they teach and practice affect regulation and impulse control strategies are presented and practiced with children and at least one caregiver. They also provide psychoeducation to parents and children in both individual and group formats. Attachment-focused activities are built into each joint parent-child session to repair or strengthen parent-child relationships that may be strained prior to treatment.
Consistent with Gil Institute’s family-focused approach to therapies, Boundary Project clinicians apply equal therapeutic attention to the caregiver(s) in order to maintain positive therapy outcomes following treatment.
Available Areas of Expertise
- Attachment and Parent-Child Relationship Problems
- Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) & Play Therapy
- Behavioral Problems at Home and School
- Working with Victims of Peer Aggression
- Children in or Transitioning from Foster Care
- Complex, Interpersonal Trauma in Childhood
- Emotion-Focused Therapy for Adults and Couples
- Expressive Arts and Integrative Therapies
- Extended Play-Based Developmental Assessment (EPBDA, Gil)
- Family Therapy for Sibling Sexual Abuse (through Boundary Project)
- Family Play Therapy
- Issues Related to Adoption and Foster Care Placement
- Posttraumatic Stress (PTS) in Children & Adolescents
- Sexual Behavior Problems (SBPs) in Children
- Sibling Sexual Abuse
- Therapeutic Art
- Trauma-Focused Integrated Play Therapy (TF IPT, Gil)