Over fifty years ago, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s research on the developmental psychology of children formed the basic tenets of attachment theory. And for years, following these tenets, the theory’s focus has been on how children develop vis-a-vis the attachments―whether secure or insecure―they form with their caregivers. In the therapy room, this has meant working with individuals one-on-one, with the therapist assuming the role of the attachment figure in order to provide a secure base for treating clients’ problems that arose from troubled interpersonal relationships in childhood. Here, Daniel A. Hughes, an eminent clinician and attachment specialist, is the first to expand this traditional model, applying attachment theory to a family therapy setting. Drawing on more than 20 years of clinical experience, Hughes presents his comprehensive, effective, and accessible treatment model for working with all members of a family―not simply the individual in question―to recognize, resolve, and heal personal and family problems using principles from theories of attachment and intersubjectivity. Beginning with an overview of attachment and intersubjectivity―the twin theories from which he forms his treatment plan―Hughes carefully outlines, chapter by chapter, the core principles and strategies of his family-based approach. He elaborates on the need to develop and maintain PACE (playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy)―the central therapeutic stance of attachment-focused family therapy―and supplies tips and sample dialogues for implementing this position. The importance of fostering affective/reflective (a/r) dialogue is covered in detail, as well as helping families to manage shame, understand and embrace the break-and-repair cycle of their interactions, and explore and resolve childhood trauma. Also discussed are the more procedural issues of how to incorporate parents into therapeutic conversations, when and how to question them on their own attachment histories, and how to “be” with children. Grounded in the fundamental principle of parents facilitating the healthy emotional development of their children, Attachment-Focused Family Therapy is the first book of its kind to offer therapists a complete manual for using attachment therapy with families. Extensive case studies, vignettes, and sample dialogues throughout clearly demonstrate how Hughes’s model plays out in the therapy room. By showing therapists how to create a bond of psychological safety and intersubjective discovery with parents and caregivers, Hughes reveals how they, in turn, can bring about similar experiences of safety and discovery for their children.

Attachment : Focused Family Therapy

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Hughes, Daniel A.

Psychology & Counseling

W.W.Norton&Company

A practical workbook companion to Attachment-Focused Family Therapy, the best-selling text that brought attachment into the realm of family therapy.
Daniel A. Hughes, a leading practitioner in his field, specializes in an attachment-oriented approach to family therapy. Applying his model to children and families with a range of psychological problems, this book distills just the clinical strategies, offering practitioners a host of practical exercises and interventions on the core skills of his treatment program.
An accompanying DVD demonstrates Hughes putting these strategies to work in a therapy session, revealing the undeniable power of attachment-focused family therapy to create a safe psychological space for families to repair attachment breaks and build the foundation for a healthier future.

Attachment-Focused Family Therapy Workbook

An attachment specialist and a clinical psychologist with neurobiology expertise team up to explore the brain science behind parenting. In this groundbreaking exploration of the brain mechanisms behind healthy caregiving, attachment specialist Daniel A. Hughes and veteran clinical psychologist Jonathan Baylin guide readers through the intricate web of neuronal processes, hormones, and chemicals that drive―and sometimes thwart―our caregiving impulses, uncovering the mysteries of the parental brain. The biggest challenge to parents, Hughes and Baylin explain, is learning how to regulate emotions that arise―feeling them deeply and honestly while staying grounded and aware enough to preserve the parent–child relationship. Stress, which can lead to “blocked” or dysfunctional care, can impede our brain’s inherent caregiving processes and negatively impact our ability to do this. While the parent–child relationship can generate deep empathy and the intense motivation to care for our children, it can also trigger self-defensive feelings rooted in our early attachment relationships, and give rise to “unparental” impulses. Learning to be a “good parent” is contingent upon learning how to manage this stress, understand its brain-based cues, and respond in a way that will set the brain back on track. To this end, Hughes and Baylin define five major “systems” of caregiving as they’re linked to the brain, explaining how they operate when parenting is strong and what happens when good parenting is compromised or “blocked.” With this awareness, we learn how to approach kids with renewed playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy, re-regulate our caregiving systems, foster deeper social engagement, and facilitate our children’s development. Infused with clinical insight, illuminating case examples, and helpful illustrations, Brain-Based Parenting brings the science of caregiving to light for the first time. Far from just managing our children’s behavior, we can develop our “parenting brains,” and with a better understanding of the neurobiological roots of our feelings and our own attachment histories, we can transform a fraught parent-child relationship into an open, regulated, and loving one.

Brain-Based Parenting: The Neuroscience of Caregiving for Healthy Attachment (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

Baylin, Jonathan

Bringing attachment theory essentials to everyday life.

8 Keys to Building Your Best Relationships (8 Keys to Mental Health)

Self-Help

Relationships

Uniting attachment-focused therapy and neurobiology to help distrustful and traumatized children revive a sense of trust and connection.
How can therapists and caregivers help maltreated children recover what they were born with: the potential to experience the safety, comfort, and joy of having trustworthy, loving adults in their lives?
This groundbreaking book explores, for the first time, how the attachment-focused family therapy model can respond to this question at a neural level. It is a rich, accessible investigation of the brain science of early childhood and developmental trauma. Each chapter offers clinicians new insights―and powerful new methods―to help neglected and insecurely attached children regain a sense of safety and security with caring adults. Throughout, vibrant clinical vignettes drawn from the authors' own experience illustrate how informed clinical processes can promote positive change.
Authors Baylin and Hughes have collaborated for many years on the treatment of maltreated children and their caregivers. Both experienced psychologists, their shared project has bee the development of the science-based model of attachment-focused therapy in this book―a model that links clinical interventions to the crucial underlying processes of trust, mistrust, and trust building―helping children learn to trust caregivers and caregivers to be the "trust builders" these children need.
The book begins by explaining the neurobiology of blocked trust, using the latest social neuroscience to show how the child's early development gets channeled into a core strategy of defensive living. Subsequent chapters address, among other valuable subjects, how new research on behavioral epigenetics has shown ways that highly stressful early life experiences affect brain development through patterns of gene expression, adapting the child's brain for mistrust rather than trust, and what it means for treatment approaches.
Finally, readers will learn what goes on in the child's brain during attachment-focused therapy, honing in on the dyadic processes of adult-child interaction that seem to embody the core "mechanisms of change": elements of attachment-focused interventions that target the child's defensive brain, calm this system, and reopen the child's potential to learn from new experiences with caring adults, and that it is safe to depend upon them.
If trust is to develop and care is to be restored, clinicians need to know what prevents the development of trust in the first place, particularly when a child is living in an environment of good care for a long period of time. What do abuse and neglect do to the development of children's brains that makes it so difficult for them to trust adults who are so different from those who hurt them? This book presents a brain-based understanding that professionals can apply to answering these questions and encouraging the development of healthy trust.

The Neurobiology of Attachment-Focused Therapy: Enhancing Connection & Trust in the Treatment of Children & Adolescents (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

From the founder of DDP, this updated and comprehensive guide is the authoritative text on DDP. DDP is an attachment-focused treatment for children and adolescents who experience abuse and neglect and who are now living in stable foster and adoptive families. Its central interventions are influenced by enhanced knowledge about the structure and functions of the brain, as well as the latest findings regarding developmental trauma and the related attachment problems it brings.

Healing Relational Trauma with Attachment-Focused Interventions: Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy with Children and Families

Medical Books

Golding, Kim S.

Hudson, Julie

Psychology

This book both explains and illustrates how the practice of child mental health professionals can be enhanced, whatever their treatment approach, to encourage engagement, resilience, and development in children with mental health problems. Alongside practical recommendations, Daniel Hughes and Ben Gurney-Smith use dialogue from clinical work to illustrate applications of these principles from Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy as well as other attachment-based practices with parents and children. This "little book" will demystify how attachment theory--one of today's most in-demand approaches--can actually be brought into clinical work. Topics include regulating emotional states; repairing ongoing relationships; establishing an attachment-based therapeutic relationship; accepting a child's inner life; assessing the caregiver's need for safety, regulation, and reflection; the importance of nonverbal and verbal conversations in facilitating secure attachment; and strengthening the mind of the child.

The Little Book of Attachment: Theory to Practice in Child Mental Health with Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy

Gurney-Smith, Ben

254 Pages. Biography of Harry Hughes growing up in Tombstone during the Earp years and along the Mexican border--later established Hughes Academy in Mexico City.

Tombstone Story, A Biography of a Arizona Pioneer

Exposition Press

This book shows how to work successfully with emotional and behavioral problems rooted in deficient early attachments. In particular, it addresses the emotional difficulties of many of the foster and adopted children living in our country who are unable to form secure attachments. Traditional interventions, which do not teach parents how to successfully engage the child, frequently do not provide the means by which the seriously damaged child can form the secure attachment that underlies behavioral change. Dr. Daniel Hughes maps out a treatment plan designed to help the child begin to experience and accept, from both the therapist and the parents, affective attunement that he or she should have received in the first few years of life. Hughes' approach includes: ―Using foster and adopted parents as co-therapists ―Teaching differentiation between old and new parents ―Overcoming the perception of discipline as abusive ―Framing misbehavior, discipline, conflicts, and parental authority as important aspects of a child's learning to trust. All children, at the core of their beings, need to be attached to someone who considers them to be very special and who is committed to providing for their ongoing care. Children who lose their birth parents desperately need such a relationship if they are to heal and grow. This book shows therapists how to facilitate this crucial bond. A Jason Aronson Book

Facilitating Developmental Attachment: The Road to Emotional Recovery and Behavioral Change in Foster and Adopted Children

Mental Health

Jason Aronson, Inc.

Building the Bonds of Attachment: Awakening Love in Deeply Troubled Children

With the unmistakable authority of a clinician, Dan Hughes builds a stirring story around the composite figure of Katie--a fragmented, tormented, isolated little girl in foster care whose terror, shame, rage and despair drive her to deeds like lacing the family hamburger with her own feces--in order to expose the tragedy of the attachment-impaired child. The author also affirms and demonstrates the possibility of transformative intervention. Allison is the confident, compassionate, and controversial therapist who diagnoses and treats Katie's profound attachment disorder. Jackie is the therapeutic foster mother who fights to create a lasting bond with Katie by applying Allison's blend of affective attunement and effective discipline. Dr. Hughes speaks in both popular and clinical voices as he animates Katie's demoralizing but eventually reparative odyssey through more homes than any child should have to live in, drawing on his decades of experience with foster and adopted youngsters, their families, and the professionals who support them. Building the Bonds of Attachment: Awakening Love in Deeply Troubled Children is richly webbed with commentary on the dynamics of that odyssey, and also on the separate and tandem roles of case manager, therapist, and parent-surrogate.

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