Our Treatment Approach

Children who come to Intermountain have a long history of extreme emotional and behavioral responses to minor events. The families of these children have not been able to regulate their emotional responses by any conventional means and the families feel increasingly trapped and overwhelmed by the child. These dysregulated emotions can arise from constitutional weaknesses in the child (e.g., pervasive developmental disorder, bipolarity, non-verbal learning disorder, predisposition to depression and anxiety), and/or from events early in the child’s life that have rendered the child unable to use caregivers to regulate them. For example, early or repeated loss of parenting figures, chronic medical health crises, adoption, neglect or trauma can contribute to a child’s inability to regulate their emotions or trust that the adult they love can care for them. Likewise, parental struggles of divorce, depression or anxiety can hamper the parent in their attempts to regulate their child.

At Intermountain, we treat children and families, not diagnoses and although we use attachment principles in our treatment, we provide a more holistic treatment than just attachment. Our first job with out-of-control children is to provide some psychological and physical safety, by increasing the structure of their lives and by helping the children regulate their emotional storms. Our second job is to listen to what the child is telling us through behavior and help the child put those feelings into words. We help children tolerate anxiety and negotiate closeness adaptively so that they can express their needs more adaptively. We help parents attune to and meet the children’s needs at the developmental level that they are expressed.

We believe that children must be able to fully understand and talk about the story of their lives through psychotherapy. Children who have troubled histories have to find some joy and positive social contacts, which their behavior has deprived them of, so our work with children also involves them having intense fun.

In all of our programs, Intermountain provides a caring treatment environment in which the capacity for loving relationships is formed and responsible behavior is established. Our treatment aims at enlarging and enhancing the circle of relationships in a manner that allows the fullest development of the child and family.