Grief is the process that occurs before people come to acceptance. It can be a painful experience involving many different feelings. Losses includes health issues, loss of a career, loss of relationships, an unborn child, and/orability or desire to have children. Experiencing loss and grieving may include physical, emotional, social, and spiritual responses. Grieving is essential for coming to terms with and processing the trauma and resultant losses. Trauma and its accompanying sense of loss may result in a terrible sense of disappointment and failure. Working with mental health professionals and other survivors can be extremely helpful in working through the grieving process. The grieving process involves acknowledgment and acceptance of loss. Psychotherapy is a process of “re-parenting” the inner child who may have had less than ideal caretaking. The neural connections in the brain can heal and change with new experiences.

Child psychotherapy requires case conceptualization through the lens of developmental psychology in a multimodal approach to assessment, diagnosis, treatment planning, and clinical interventions. This chapter outlines a blueprint for therapists to provide treatment for children by integrating these fundamental principles while collaborating with the other people in the child’s life. The chapter guides the therapist through case conceptualization that integrates the most efficacious treatment interventions into the eight-phase template of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). Adaptive information processing (AIP) theory drives treatment with EMDR throughout the eight phases of that protocol and provides a template for case conceptualization and treatment planning. The use of the EMDR approach to psychotherapy is well documented and approved as evidence-based practice in Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) and California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare (CEBC).

In the therapeutic community (TC), the therapeutic and educational component that focuses specifically on the individual consists of the various forms of group process. The groups that are TC-oriented, such as encounters, probes, and marathons, retain distinctive self-help elements of the TC approach. This chapter provides an overview of general elements and forms of group process in the TC. Conventional psychotherapy and group therapy have not been particularly effective with substance abusers entering TCs for various reasons. Group tools are certain strategies of verbal and nonverbal interchange that are employed by participants to facilitate individual change in group process. There are two main classes of group process strategies: provocative tools and evocative tools. Provocative tools, hostility or anger, engrossment, and ridicule or humor, are most pointedly used to penetrate denial and break down deviant coping strategies such as lying.

This chapter clarifies treatment throughout the similarities as well as the differences between eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR) therapy and sensorimotor psychotherapy in child treatment. Dysregulated arousal and overactive animal defenses biased by traumatic experience are at the root of many symptoms and difficulties observed in traumatized children. Traumatic or adverse experiences are encoded in memory networks in the brain. The adaptive information processing (AIP) looks at different components of the memory network: cognitive, emotional and somatic. EMDR therapy and its phases access not only the cognitive aspects of the memory, but the affective and bodily states. In working with children, microphones may add a playful approach to translating the body’s language. Oscillation techniques are also useful in helping children to shift their focus from dysregulated states to a more resourced experience, which supports flexibility in state shifting and increases awareness of different states.

Dryden has argued that there are various sources of influence that impinge upon the therapist and client as they seek to determine in which therapeutic modality to work. The rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) model of disturbance emphasizes the role played by the individual’s Belief system in his or her psychological problems; this may influence its practitioners to work more frequently in the modality of individual therapy than in other modalities. Individual therapy is particularly indicated for clients who have profound difficulties sharing therapeutic time with other clients. Clients may move from modality to modality, and thus individual therapy, can be best viewed as part of a comprehensive treatment strategy. Some REBT therapists attempt to induct clients into REBT by involving them in pretherapy induction activities. Therapists can also impede client progress by failing to help clients to attain closure on a particular problem.

This chapter explores several approaches in helping a client develop an Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) targeting sequence plan to address the presenting problem(s). As with all psychotherapy approaches, it is important to obtain a full clinical history to identify stabilization needs, environmental management skills, and symptoms where EMDR reprocessing will be appropriate. The client’s presentation may fall into either being simple or comprehensive. For simple presentations, several possible targeting sequence plans are possible, depending upon the client’s dominant symptom. For those presenting with a dominant irrational belief, clustering all incidents within that belief will lend itself to a very efficient targeting sequence plan that addresses all prongs, past incidents starting with the Touchstone Event, present triggers, and future issues anticipating anxieties. The chapter presents Intake Questionnaire, guidelines for creating a Targeting Sequence Plan, and the Worksheets that are invaluable tools in assisting therapists in gathering the client’s information.

This chapter describes the procedural steps of the Assessment Phase and Desensitization Phase of the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Standard Protocol with detailed scripts for steering a child through each phase. It includes summary sheets to facilitate gathering information, client documentation, and quick retrieval of salient information while formulating a treatment plan. Assessment phase note section starts with Target Identification; this is a continuation of what began during the Client History and Treatment Planning Phase. The therapist should already have some idea of what the child may choose given previous target identification procedures such as Mapping and Graphing or other procedures for eliciting targets with children. Once the target has been selected, the therapist continues with Image, negative cognition (NC), positive cognition (PC), validity of cognition (VOC), emotion, subjective units of disturbance (SUD), and body sensation to move on to the desensitization phase.