Welcome to the virtual home of our newest book, Healing Developmental Trauma: A Systemic Approach for Counseling Individuals, Couples and Families, just released by Love Publishing in Denver, Colorado. This ground-breaking book is based on twenty-five years of research as mental health practitioners and former faculty members at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.
Here on this site we share important concepts from this book, along with self-inventories and other excerpted materials. Some of these materials can be accessed and downloaded immediately. Others are available only to those who sign up for our regular newsletters.
Much of our clinical research about developmental trauma came from working with people who have middle to high levels of education, moderate levels of self-awareness awareness and come from more functional family backgrounds. In our clinical practices and therapy intensives, we referred potential clients with symptoms of chronic mental illnesses, severe addictions and multiple diagnoses to other professionals who specialize in these areas.
The experience at the heart of developmental shock, trauma and stress involves the loss of emotional attunement between infants and their parents, particularly their mothers, during the first three years of life.
This attunement is a sensory experience that involves visual, auditory, olfactory and proprioceptive engagement that enlivens both the child and the adult caregiver. When this attunement is disrupted too frequently or for too long during the first six to eight months of life, infants fall into dissociative shock states. As children reach the toddler stage and have more internal resources for coping with the loss of attunement with their caregivers, they are more likely to experience trauma or stress states rather than shock. Infants nervous systems come wired for experiences of attunement. These early experiences of either emotional attunement or mis-attunement create a template for all subsequent relationships, for adult mental and physical health.
Watch Dr. David Arredondo talk about Attunement and Why It Matters in this YouTube:
The experience at the heart of developmental shock, trauma and stress involves the loss of emotional attunement between infants and their parents, particularly their mothers, during the first three years of life.
To learn how to distinguish between shock, trauma and stress, see The Trauma Continuum.
Our focus is helping individuals and committed couples with families learn how to use these intimate relationships as crucibles for healing developmental shock, trauma and stress, and to support them in conceiving, birthing and parenting their children more consciously and more effectively.
For about eight years of our early clinical practice, we worked intensively with individuals, couples and families. Janae’s practice focused primarily on women and their issues and Barry’s on men and their issues. We almost always worked as co-therapists when counseling couples and families to help prevent triangulation dynamics from surfacing. We typically began counseling couples with each of us working separately with the partners, then coaching them together in implementing their skills as a couple. Perhaps the most rewarding part of our work was our practice of making house calls to help transform the family system.
At some point in our relationship, we began referring to it as a “laboratory” because we recognized the universal struggles and issues that all couples face in their efforts to experience conscious intimacy. Much of what we shared in our clinical work with couples grew out of our personal experiences in healing our own developmental traumas.
You can find much of the information we've written about our personal healing journeys and our with individuals, couples and families in our other books: Breaking Free of the Co-dependency Trap, The Flight From Intimacy and Conflict Resolution: The Partnership Way.
For more information on developmental parenting and child rearing, visit our websites parentinghelp4you and The Kindness Campaign.
For more information about the impact of developmental shock, trauma and stress on both mental and physical health, visit our website ucanhealyourself.
For more information about our clinical approach for healing developmental trauma, visit our website, Developmental Process Work.
For more information about the systemic application and implementation of our developmental approach, visit our website, Developmental Systems Theory.
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