Description
Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children (RFP-C) with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach offers a new, short term psychotherapeutic approach to working dynamically with children who suffer from irritability, oppositional defiance and disruptiveness. RFP-C enables clinicians to help by addressing and detailing how the child’s externalizing behaviors have meaning which they can convey to the child. Using clinical examples throughout, Hoffman, Rice and Prout demonstrate that in many dysregulated children, RFP-C can:
Achieve symptomatic improvement and developmental maturation as a result of gains in the ability to tolerate and metabolize painful emotions, by addressing the crucial underlying emotional component.
Diminish the child’s use of aggression as the main coping device by allowing painful emotions to be mastered more effectively.
Help to systematically address avoidance mechanisms, talking to the child about how their disruptive behavior helps them avoid painful emotions.
Facilitate development of an awareness that painful emotions do not have to be so vigorously warded off, allowing the child to reach this implicit awareness within the relationship with the clinician, which can then be expanded to life situations at home and at school.
This handbook is the first to provide a manualized, short-term dynamic approach to the externalizing behaviors of childhood, offering organizing framework and detailed descriptions of the processes involved in RFP-C. Supplying clinicians with a systematic individual psychotherapy as an alternative or complement to PMT, CBT and psychotropic medication, it also shifts focus away from simply helping parents manage their children’s misbehaviors. Significantly, the approach shows that clinical work with these children is compatible with understanding the children’s brain functioning, and posits that contemporary affect-oriented conceptualizations of defense mechanisms are theoretically similar to the neuroscience construct of implicit emotion regulation, promoting an interface between psychodynamics and contemporary academic psychiatry and psychology.
Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children (RFP-C) with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach is a comprehensive tool capable of application at all levels of professional training, offering a new approach for psychoanalysts, child and adolescent counselors, psychotherapists and mental health clinicians in fields including social work, psychology and psychiatry.
For many years, many of us clinicians instinctually believed that there must be more focus on the interpersonal connection. This modality and the research behind it finally brings the evidence base for our long held beliefs. When working with children who engage in disruptive behaviours there are more options than you thought you had.
I’ve read and re-read this manual, not only in learning how to provide RFP-C specifically, but also as a guide to conducting psychodynamic psychotherapy with children more generally. This book is everything you could want in a therapy manual – it offers succinct, clear, stage-by-stage principles for treating children with externalizing behaviors while also allowing flexibility to tailor the intervention to the individual needs of the child. It provides useful clinical examples and offers advice for including parents in the therapy process. This manual explains and fleshes out psychodynamic theory and concepts while connecting these concepts to current neuroscience and emotion regulation research. Every psychology trainee looking for new approaches to treating children with externalizing behaviors should read this book.
Wonderful manual to add to your toolbox for those who work with children with oppositional behavior.
Very worthwhile and loaded with invaluable info on how to conduct sessions with children and parents in psychotherapy.
This treatment manual does an excellent job demystifying the work of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children by outlining the arc of treatment and providing relevant case examples. Interventions are explained — both in terms of technique and how they link to the goals of treatment. The manual is a welcome touchstone for beginning clinicians while also allowing for plenty of flexibility to accommodate the unique aspects of each patient, therapist, and treatment setting. Conducting RFP-C has been an extremely rewarding and impactful experience for me and for my patient and his parent. It’s amazing how much progress can be made in so short a time!