Click on any of the questions below for answers to the most frequently asked questions.  If your question is not listed, feel free to click here and email us for more information. 

- What is The Institute For Attachment & Child Development ("IACD")?
- What is Attachment Disorder?
- What is Attachment Therapy?
- What kind of Attachment Therapy does IACD use?
- What are the symptoms of Attachment Disorder
- How does the treatment parent process work?
- What does it take to become a treatment parent?
- What Kind of training does it take to do Attachment Therapy?
- How is it different from other therapy?
- How do you know a child needs this therapy?
- How well trained do therapists need to be to do this therapy?
- Are parents qualified to do this therapy?
- Why is it so controversial?
- What do the costs cover?
- What is the goal of treatment?
- What type of child do we treat at IACD?
- What are the directions for driving to IACD?
- What accommodations are located nearby IACD?

What is The Institute For Attachment & Child Development?

The Institute For Attachment & Child Development (IACD) is a licensed, not-for-profit treatment, training, research center and child placement agency that has been highly successful in treating Attachment Disorder. Established in 1972 by a juvenile judge, a psychiatrist, and a civic leader, IACD pioneered Attachment Therapy to treat so called “incorrigible” children thought to be untreatable. Through a family-centered therapy approach that is effective and safe, IACD successfully has treated thousands of children with severe behavioral disturbances, enabling them to adapt to their environment, both socially and emotionally. IACD’s professional licensed therapists are recognized authorities in the field of Attachment Disorder and in building healthy parenting skills. Professionals and others frequently call upon IACD therapists to provide expert advice in the field of Attachment Therapy.

What is Attachment Disorder?

Attachment Disorder results when a serious interruption occurs in the bonding between mother and child during the child’s first 26 months of life. Risk factors for developing the disorder include:

• genetic predisposition;
• maternal ambivalence toward pregnancy;
• a traumatic prenatal experience;
• in utero exposure to drugs or alcohol;
• birth trauma;
• sexual + physical abuse;
• sudden separation from the mother due to such factors as a child’s illness, inconsistent or inadequate day care, chronic maternal depression, poor parenting skills, neglect or abandonment, frequent moves and/or placements, including foster care or failed adoptions.

What is Attachment Therapy?

Attachment Therapy is a unique synthesis of many different techniques to promote attachment between a child and parent. These techniques are rooted in a thorough understanding of neurobiological factors, the function of memory, the effects of trauma, grief and loss, and the critical importance attachment plays in a child’s healthy development. Treatment occurs within the context of a safe, nurturing, respectful environment. Treatment goals are definitive and measurable. With treatment, the child:

• Develops a healthy attachment to parent figures.
• Learns to identify and appropriately express feelings.
• Is helped to work through early trauma, grief, and loss.
• Develops a capacity for self-control.
• Develops a positive sense of identity.
• Develops empathy for others and engages in reciprocal interactions.
• Develops a capacity for thoughtful decision-making.
• Accepts responsibility for his or her own behavior.
• Reduces acting out, aggressive and destructive behavior.
• Develops a conscience and experiences appropriate guilt and remorse.
• Develops a capacity for joyful play.
• Learns to accept loving, nurturing care and guidance from parents.
• Becomes a law-abiding citizen.
  

What kind of Attachment Therapy Does IACD Use?

As a pioneer in the field of attachment therapy, IACD has developed a multidisciplinary team approach to treating the client and his or her family based on individual assessment and need. A specialized treatment team comprised of IACD therapists, a psychiatrist, therapeutic foster parents, the child, the child’s hometown therapist, and parent resource coordinator take charge of the child’s care and develop a treatment plan. Others, including a child’s parents or guardians and the placing or funding agency, also become part of the child’s support team.

Intensive psychotherapy is combined with therapeutic foster care so that the child is enveloped in a therapeutic environment 24 hours a day. Highly trained therapeutic foster parents reinforce the child’s efforts to resolve issues he or she addresses in therapy. Few treatment programs offer this depth of therapy and clinical involvement.

Treatment depends upon the needs of the child. The treatment course begins with a Two-week Intensive, which may be followed by extended treatment of approximately nine months. Treatment includes placing the child in a therapeutic foster family for the duration of his therapy, therapy sessions, psychoeducational services, psychiatric evaluation, team treatment planning, and (once treatment is completed) reintegrating the child back into his placement family. Therapeutic foster parents, placement parents, and referring therapist observe and participate in the therapy sessions as appropriate. Once the child is discharged from the program, IACD provides intensive reintegration services for three months. Often, the child and his or her placement parents stay in touch with the therapeutic foster parents long after the child returns home.

What Are the Symptoms of Attachment Disorder

Symptoms of Attachment Disorder include:

• an inability to give or receive affection;
• lack of cause-and-effect thinking;
• inability to empathize with others or feel remorse;
• destructive to self, property and others;
• cheating, lying, and stealing;
• manipulating others;
• preoccupation with fire, blood and gore;
• cruelty to animals and other vulnerable creatures;
• superficially charming and indiscriminately affectionate with strangers.
  

How Does the Treatment Parent Process Work?

Treatment Parenting is an approach to treating children and training parents of children with severe emotional disorders. At IACD, the therapeutic foster parent is an essential component of supportive and clinical services. Because children with Attachment Disorder have the most difficulty dealing with the emotional closeness and reciprocal relationships that come with family living, the family is crucial to helping the child heal and learn to live in within a family setting and in society. Children enrolled in IACD’s Two-week Intensive, Extended Care, Support Supervision and Permanent Placement, Families for Colorado Children, and Respite programs live with treament parent families while in treatment.

What Does it Take to Become a Treatment Parent?

Becoming a Treatment Parent requires special experience and personal qualities. These qualifications include previous parenting experience, the willingness to continually upgrade knowledge of parenting and other skills needed to care for a child with Attachment Disorder, assertiveness, intelligence, empathety, responsibility, nurturing behavior, possession of a sense of humor, patience, and the ability to act as part of a team.

The Treatment Parent is a highly skilled and trained individual who works in conjunction with a treatment team, creating an environment in which the team treatment plan is implemented on a 24-hour basis. Treatment Parents not only are committed to children and the team approach to treatment, they are committed to remaining emotionally stable and healthy despite a child’s provocation, they are open to consideration of all therapeutic tools and dedicated to staying current in the field through continuing education.

What Kind of Training Does it Take to do Attachment Therapy?

Attachment Therapy training is conducted through IACD’s Training Institute. To be accepted for training, a person must be a licensed therapist, hold a master’s degree in social work or a related field and have at least three years experience in the field of human services. Training is offered at three levels: Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced.

• Basic Training consists of classroom study, reading, and discussion;
• Intermediate Training involves observation of the Two-week Intensive therapy sessions and hands-on learning under the direct supervision of the attending therapist;
• Avanced Training is conducted under the guidance of a qualified Attachment Therapist as mentor. Length of training is left to the discretion of the mentor who determines when the trainee has developed the advanced skills necessary to practice Attachment Therapy.
  

How is it Different From Other Therapy?

Most traditional therapy involves talk therapy and is based upon the development of a therapeutic relationship between therapist and client. This relationship requires mutual trust, respect, reciprocity, emotional honesty and the ability to formulate thoughts and feelings into words.

Children with Attachment Disorder are unable to make use of such methods because:

• They do not trust.
• They are not emotionally honest and, in fact, frequently are not able to identify their feelings or what is behind those feelings.
• They do not respect anyone, including themselves.
• They are not capable of reciprocal give and take relationships.
• Their backgrounds of abuse, neglect, unresolved trauma or pain, loss and abandonment frequently occurred during the first year or two of life, prior to conscious memory of events.
• They do not know why they feel and act as they do.
• They are operating in the only way they know how to survive.
  

How do You Know a Child Needs This Therapy?

Such decisions to utilize Attachment Therapy to assist an individual must be carefully made following an extensive evaluation process that includes:

• Social history
• Medical history/evaluation
• Psychiatric evaluation
• Parent's reports of behavior
• Observation of family interaction
• Family assessment
• Early childhood history consistent with the the development of Attachment Disorder
• Previous response to more traditional therapeutic methods

How Well Trained Do Therapists Need to Be to Do This Therapy?

Extensive and specific training detailing various aspects of Attachment Therapies are necessary.

Are Parents Qualified to Do This Therapy?

Parents can utilize various "holding" techniques to facilitate positive therapeutic outcomes for children in their care. Some examples of techniques trained parents can use are: lap or cuddle time to facilitate attachment and restraint techniques used specifically by trained parents that help to safely restrain an out of control child who is a danger to self/others, etc. Parents are not therapists, even though they are therapeutic. Therapy represents a planned intervention by an emotionally objective, trained and licensed therapist.

Why It Is So Controversial

There are many reasons why some individuals have difficulty with this method. A primary reason is they do not understand these children. They find it difficult to believe that children so young can have the severe problems we see. Another reason is they believe that "love and security" will cure the most horrendous of childhood backgrounds. Sometimes they believe other methods would work, especially when they are uncomfortable with strong, intense emotions themselves, or they have unresolved issues of their own. These people often believe that strong, intense emotions are bad for anyone. Others believe an individual's rights take precedence over family and societal safety and well being. Even when a child is destroying a family through his out of control behavior. They believe you should follow the child's lead in therapy. (Children with Attachment Disorder do not have a clue what the problem is. They have no other point of reference other than what they do to survive.)

Some critics believe that holding a child is bad. These children however, who are so adept at keeping people at a distance and being in control at all times need touch to work through their problems. Other critics believe that confrontation is bad for a child. Confrontation however is sometimes necessary to break through a child's defenses and reach the hurting child within. Confrontation of faulty thinking patterns and destructive behavior patterns is essential if change is to occur.
Finally some people have been misinformed about techniques and philosophies used in Attachment Therapy or they misunderstand the techniques used and the rationale for their use.

What Do the Costs Cover?

Attachment Therapy requires highly trained, skilled and competent therapeutic staff;

• Highly trained, skilled and competent therapeutic families who dedicate their lives to helping these extremely difficult and destructive children;
• Specialized facilities;
• Training for placing parents ;
• Training for therapists that will continue to help each child and his family through many years of difficulty.

What Is the Goal of Treatment?

CHILD

• Validate the child's feelings.
• Identify, appropriately express and regulate feelings.
• Resolve early trauma.
• Work through grief and loss issues.
• Cognitively restructure faulty thinking patterns.
• Learn to see the world, and his or her place in it, in more realistic terms.
• Help child develop positive sense of identity.
• Help child to reshape his or her behavior to more appropriate and socially acceptable levels.
• Help child learn how to relate to others in a respectful, responsible, and reciprocal way.
• Help child to develop thoughtful decision making skills.
• Help child to experience and accept loving, nurturing care.
• Increasing child's self-control abilities.

PARENTS

• Help parents learn effective parenting techniques.
• Help parents identify and alter negative interaction patterns.
• Help parents resolve their own issues of grief and loss.

What Type of Child Do We Treat at IACD?

We treat children with moderate to severe symptoms of Attachment Disorder. We accept children between the ages of 5 through 18 who have a supportive home environment within which to work. We treat children under five but within a more individualized program rather than the two-week intensive program. We treat teenagers who are able to contract for therapy. We ask parents of teens: "Is your teen feeling enough internal conflict about how their life is going to do what is needed to make it better?"

What Are the Directions for Driving to IACD?

From I-70 West
Take Evergreen Parkway Exit #252 (this is also known as Highway 74)
Follow Evergreen Parkway, Highway 74 for approximately 7 miles to Douglas Park Rd
Take a left on Douglas Park Rd. (just past the Safeway Center on your right)
Douglas Park Road turns into Meadow Drive (At the top of the hill)
Follow Meadow Drive to Iris and take a left on Iris -
Follow Iris to Fireweed Drive and take a right on Fireweed Drive
Go down the hill and turn right into the ECC parking lot

From Highway 285 going into the mountains
Follow 285 and go right on Parmalee Gulch Road (Indian Hills)
Follow Parmalee Gulch Rd to intersection with a stop sign (Kittredge-approx. 5 miles)
Turn left at the stop sign—proceed through Kittredge to Evergreen
Take a right on Meadow Drive (Bradley Sinclair Gas Station on right)
Take a right on Iris (first street you come to)
Take a right on Fireweed
Go down the hill and turn right into the Evergreen Conference Center parking lot

From C-470
Take Morrison Exit going West onto Highway 74 - go through the town of Morrison - follow signs to Evergreen (Hwy. 74)
Take a right on Meadow Drive (Bradley Sinclair Gas Station on right) follow Meadow Drive to Iris
Take a right on Iris (first street you come to) follow Iris to Fireweed
Take a right on Fireweed
Go down the hill and turn right into the Evergreen Conference Center parking lot

What accommodations are located nearby IACD?

The campus of The Insitute For Attachment & Child Development, known as The Evergreen Conference Center, has a charming six bedroom guest house which is available to families and visiting therapists at a special rate for The Institute For Attachment & Child Development clients of $55 per room per night. Some programs may include accomodations. Please contact us for specific information.