About
As a Level 2 trained practitioner in Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP), at iSEEu Counselling, we integrate DDP principles into our therapeutic work.
Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy is a family-centred therapy focused on relationships involving the child and their parents and/or caregivers. It combines care-giving attachment and attachment theory, including developmental trauma, neurobiology trauma, intersubjectivity theory and child development. Using PACE (Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy), it helps children learn to trust, enabling them to increasingly experience feelings of safety and secure attachment - promoting healthy regulation, decreasing dysregulation, and reduces feelings of guilt, fear, and shame. Parents and care-givers also begin to feel supported, safe, regulated knowing increasingly that they are good people, they are doing the best they can and they love their child/children.
Attachment-Focused Parenting and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy begins with therapeutic work with the parents or care-givers. We explore parents' own attachment histories, their hopes and dreams about parenting, and build on their parenting styles, and trust. This, in turn gives parents resilience and facilitates the next step of therapy, which is the child joining the therapy.
The dyadic work with the parent/care-giver and the child involves working in a relational way with both the child and the parent(s). The child’s story can be told through the process of Intersubjectivity, a vital human connection of shared reciprocal experience between the parent and the child. Intersubjectivity enables the parent to step into their child’s inner world/frame of reference, experience what it is like for their child, and remain present for their child with the use of PACE. This involves demonstrating empathy by expressing compassion and curiosity without expectation or judgement. This process enables the child to
experience their feelings and concerns being heard, increasing trust within the child-to-parent relationship.
With intersubjectivity, as the experiences of parents and their children tend to have an impact on both individual's experience of the other, the child also begins to learn empathy for others such as their parents. Parents can bring in their own experiences from their own frame of reference. As each begins to see the other's point of view, positive acceptance begins to emerge including positive feelings of guilt (to be sorry, willing to accept responsibility, to make restitution, to repair the relationship), which aids in addressing any feelings of shame that come up. Promoting co-regulation and co-creation, increasing secure attachment within the self, and the family unit is at the core of iSEEu Counselling's approach.
