Catchpoint's Creative Attachment Therapy Model is based on attachment theory and research into the effectiveness of creative arts and play therapies in healing trauma. Creative Attachment Therapy focuses on the parent-child relationship.

Trauma & Secondary Trauma

Trauma is an overwhelming experience that involves fear of actual death or witnessing such an event. This can be from a single traumatic event or repeated over a period of time.

Children whose needs are not met (neglect), who are not comforted when anxious (affect regulation) or who experience their world as hostile and unsafe (no secure base or safe haven) will be traumatised, as well as those who experience traumatic pain or injury as part of their early nurturing. If the source of that trauma is their primary carer - their potential source of nurturing, safety and comfort - they will develop strong protective, behaviours and developmental injury to the brain. Their protective behaviours will prevent them effectively seeking their carer when anxious or fearful for comfort or security (attachment behaviour), and they may reject their carer's approaches fearing further harm.

These behaviours are resistant to change even when the child is placed in a safe and nurturing environment. The experience of trauma has given him a belief in himself as undeserving of comfort or safety. The behaviours and strategies that protected him from experiencing the worst of the trauma while in a hostile environment now become a barrier to the parents or carers who are trying to build positive bonding and a sense of belonging in their family.

The child does not know how to explain his behaviours or his anxieties but he hopes that what protected him in the past will protect him again. These behaviours then cause the same feelings of trauma in the parents or carers as in the child at the time of the trauma. Trauma is communicated as secondary trauma to anyone who is attuned to the child, especially the 'mother'.