Treatment
New Haven therapists and medical personnel apply the most current, clinically sound approaches to our treatment of adolescent girls, including DBT, CBT, family and multi-systemic therapies, motivational interviewing, and SMART Recovery. Our Family Works© approach to treatment, however, ensures that clinical treatment occurs in a deeply relational, nurturing context that accounts not only for each girl's diagnostic profile, but for her strengths, her dreams, and her family system, as well as her physical, emotional, and spiritual needs.
Our Family Works© approach is based on years of experience and research, and a deep understanding of what girls need in order to live successful, connected, happy lives.
Girls Need ... FAMILY
Research confirms that the family is the ultimate place for nurturance, belonging, and healing. Girls need the support of their family to feel that deepest sense of home and love so critical for life success. Using a family-systems approach, we embrace each family in a program of nurturance, learning, and skill building; this approach brings healing not only to our students but to their families as well.
Girls Need ... VALUES
A clear sense of personal values and ethics allows a girl to chart and follow a course to a meaningful life destination. Our Family Works© Values Program functions like a GPS for life! It allows girls and their families to reflect on what they care most about and, based on those values, to choose where they want to go in life. It also provides the tools necessary to find their way, a turn at a time, to that destination. Families experience this process of values-based reflection, sharing, and skill building as a meaningful way of strengthening and deepening their family bonds.
Girls Need ... COMMUNITY
People are profoundly social creatures – especially adolescent girls! We know that every girl in our care is deeply sensitive to the social groups that she interacts with. In the parlance of multi-systemic therapy, these social groups are called systems. Our treatment team has a sophisticated understanding of how these systems must be engaged in order to create an optimal environment for each girl's healing, health, and success. We know that our own treatment team must function as a healthy system first if it is to provide guidance to other systems such as the student body, the larger school community, our parent community, and individual families. A program of regular professional development, rigorous communication, team building, and personal work provides our staff with a strong foundation for doing effective multi-systemic work.
