Therapists in training with CCFH strengthen child-parent bonds
Last year, CCFH’s North Carolina Child Treatment Program (NC CTP) trained 404 licensed therapists to provide effective treatments for childhood trauma. Tiffany Parlier, LPA, a clinical counselor with Family NET of Catawba County, was one of those therapists learning Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) with NC CTP’s clinical faculty team.
Parlier wasn’t new to the rigorous learning collaborative model that NC CTP uses to provide instruction, coaching, and consultation to cohorts of clinicians over 12 to 18 months. She went through training with NC CTP for Parent-Child Interaction Therapy in 2012 and for Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in 2013.
“Most of the children and families that I work with are involved with the Child Welfare System and have been exposed to scary situations,” Tiffany says. “We previously had limited options in our area of ways to help our younger children process the trauma they had experienced. CPP gives us the tools to help young children and families to process – through play – the experiences they have had and build a protective shield with the adult to help them feel safe. It has been a great resource for the children and families that we serve.”
Families in Parlier’s community agree.
“Going through CPP with Tiffany was the best decision we could have made for our newly-formed family,” shares a family that Tiffany treated during her Child-Parent Psychotherapy training with NC CTP. “CPP offers space for parents to process their own story, struggles, and successes without judgement before involving your child. I found comfort knowing that my time in therapy with my daughter was built to address her unique needs as well as my own. It felt like we were working as a parent/child team and our bond is so much stronger because of that. We developed mutual respect and appreciation because the CPP process was designed to help us both accept each other as we are.”
Therapists learning CPP understand that every caregiver contributes something valuable to their own healing and growth notes Donna Potter, LCSW, lead trainer and senior clinical faculty consultant for CPP at CCFH. “A good demonstration of how CPP works is Tiffany’s sense that she wasn’t coming in giving this family something they didn’t already have, but that they were together creating new understandings [of how to heal].”