Regulation Focused Psychotherapy for Children Treatment Manual

Testimonials

"The child and adolescent world desperately needs a viable psychodynamic arrow in the quiver for managing disruptive behavioral disorders in kids. It has arrived."

Dr. Aaron Krasner, Yale Child Study Center & Silver Hill Hospital

"This wedding of psychodynamic principles into a systematized, clear, and manualized approach is what makes this book so imaginative and modern in its approach to a very serious problem facing children, parents, mental health clinicians, and society."

Dr. John D. O'Brien, NYC Health and Hospitals-Bellevue

"A must for child psychotherapists who wish to treat externalizing behavior disorders effectively."

Dr. Wendy Olesker, Training & Supervising Analyst, New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute

“An unusual and potentially groundbreaking book. Overall, this book is an exciting departure for psychoanalytic psychotherapy with children. It is a compassionate approach, one that embraces contemporary research findings and important new disciplines such as neurobiology, but at the same time remains true to its psychoanalytic core beliefs and practices. It brings core psychoanalytic ideas back into the center of therapy with very challenging children, and speaks a language that nonpsychoanalytic clinicians will understand.”

Dr. Graham Music, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman Clinics, Author of Nurturing Natures: Attachment and Children's Emotional, Sociocultural and Brain Development

“A novel book and a must-read for clinicians who work with children.”

Dr. Barbara Milrod, Director, Psychiatry Research Institute at Montefiore Einstein

“A must-read for experienced clinicians as well as novices to the profession.”

Dr. Saralea Chazan, Professor Emeritus - St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute & author of Children with Conduct Disorders: A Psychotherapy Manual

“This book is of such scope it must be considered a magnum opus for the field of clinical psychology and psychiatry. . .There is no book quite like this one available. A 'must have' for every child clinician.”

Dr. Miriam Steele - The New School for Social Research

About RFP-C

Regulation Focused Psychotherapy for Children (RFP-C) is a short-term, psychodynamic psychotherapy (STPP) for children who are chronically irritable, oppositional, and disruptive. RFP-C consists of 16 individual play therapy sessions plus 4 sessions with the child’s caregiver(s) only. The basis for the therapeutic process in RFP-C is that all behavior has meaning and that some children engage in disruptive behaviors as a way to avoid experiencing painful or threatening emotions such as guilt, shame, and sadness.

The goals of child sessions are to:

Identify which of the child’s emotions are being avoided
Understand how the emotion is being avoided
Explore why the emotion is being avoided in a maladaptive way

The goals of caregiver sessions are to:

Obtain clinical background information
Develop the therapeutic alliance
Provide psycho-education to aid in caregivers’ understanding of the child’s difficulties

The ultimate goal of RFP-C is to help the caregiver and child understand that all behavior, even disruptive behavior, has meaning in the service of emotional and behavioral regulation. This insight leads to a decreased need to act on the distressing emotions (i.e. less need for disruptive behaviors) and an increased ability to tolerate, work through, and talk about the feelings that previously needed to be warded off.

Research demonstrates that children who participate in RFP-C experience significant decreases in irritability and fewer episodes of oppositional and disruptive behavior. Learn more about research on RFP-C.