About
As a Level 2 trained in Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP), I apply the DDP principles into my work.
Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy is a family-centred therapy about relationships, which involves the child and their parents/care-givers. It combines care-giving attachment/attachment theory, including developmental trauma, neurobiology trauma, intersubjectivity theory and child development, with the use of PACE (playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy) to help children learn to trust, enabling them to increasingly experience feelings of safety and secure attachment. Promoting healthy regulation, decreasing dysregulation, feelings of guilt, fear and shame. Parents/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.
Attachment-Focused Parenting and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy entails starting the therapeutic work with the parents/care-givers - exploring parents own attachment history, their hopes and dreams about parenting, building on their parenting styles, building trust, which in turn gives parents resilience and facilitates the next step of the therapy which is: the child joining the therapy.
The Dyadic work with the parent/care-giver and the child entails working in a relational way with child and parent(s) - the child’s story is able to be told through the process of Intersubjectivity, which is a vital human connection of shared reciprocal experience between parent and 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 with the use of PACE remain present for their child, express compassion, curiosity without expectation or judgement and empathy. This in turn enables the child to experience their feelings, concerns are being heard, which increases the gaining of trust within the child-to-parent relationship. With intersubjectivity: as the experience of parent and/or child can have an impact on the experience of one another, the child also begins to learn empathy for others such as his/her parents, and parents can bring in their own experience/what it is like for them (the parents).