We firmly believe in obtaining the assent of all involved in our work, particularly your child, when it comes to providing any intervention or support. This allows us to provide a truly collaborative and person-centred approach that honours the right of all of our clients to make choices about their lives.
Anyone who is facing challenges in their lives deserves compassion from others, and from themselves, as they make their way through their obstacles. Our consultants promote empathy, self-compassion and empowerment, while providing support to live your best life.
The foundations of any relationship require trust and a feeling of safety. Our consultants will always work first to foster that trusting relationship with your child. This value for us also reflects our use of effective, evidence-based therapeutic practices, and our use of data-driven decision making processes.
Behaviour analysis is what underpins everything we do at ACT to Connect. Behavior analysis is the science of how our actions and behaviours are influenced by the environment around us. It focuses on understanding why we do the things we do, how our surroundings affect our actions, and how we can use that knowledge to support new learning and make changes in our behaviour in directions that add value to our lives.
At Act to Connect we use this knowledge to help us, understand the layers of reasons behind your child's actions, thoughts and feelings.
Identify and support specific actions or skills that open up your child to new sources of natural motivation and reward and to new opportunities for behavioural, emotional and cognitive learning and development.
Identify any barriers hindering that growth and development and how we can support your child to overcome them.
NDBI involves the implementation of behaviour analytic based strategies within your child’s everyday environment. We use the naturally occurring routines, interactions and contingencies that exist there to build new skills that will support their growth and development in ways that are meaningful and useful to them. By following the motivations and interests of your child, and promoting the shared control of child and adult learning, we can be developmentally sensitive when it comes to choosing target skills, more readily able to incorporate learning into everyday life and can promote generalisation across different areas of life. Some examples of NDBI include the Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), Incidental Teaching and Natural Environment Teaching.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) seeks to increase your, or your child's psychological flexibility and wellbeing. It is based on the understanding that trying to control or eliminate our unpleasant thoughts and feelings often keeps us trapped by those thoughts and feelings, leading only to increased distress. Instead ACT encourages us to be mindful of our inner experiences, acknowledge and accept our difficult emotions and thoughts with compassion, and then choose actions that bring us in contact with parts of ourselves and our world that we value, in the service of building our overall psychological well-being and quality of life.
This approach combines mindfulness techniques and language as intervention, with behavioural strategies to promote more open, present, and meaningful lives even in the presence of challenging situations, thoughts and feelings.
SPACE stands for Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions and is a parent-based treatment programme that supports parents in being the agent of change for their child. This programme helps support children and adolescents with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder and involves equipping the key adults in their lives with the skills and tools to help their child overcome their challenges. The focus is on helping you to support your child while reducing the accommodations you’ve been making to your child’s symptoms.
Empathy and validation
Supportive Statements
Anxiety maintaining accommodation reductions
Behaviour therapy refers to any intervention that uses behaviour principles to address behaviours that are causing problems for your child. While we never endeavour to change who your child is, we can help support them to learn new functional skills that better help them get their needs met.. Some examples of strategies we use include:
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) – this supports individuals, usually those struggling with anxiety or OCD, to be able to face their distressing thoughts and feelings without needing to engage in compulsive or other maladaptive behaviours to ‘put them right’.
Habit Reversal – this supports individuals who are struggling with repetitive behaviours, e.g. tics, hair pulling or skin picking, This intervention involves building an increased awareness of the behaviour, learning to tolerate the urge to follow through, and finding competing behaviours they can engage in instead.
Behavoural Activation – this intervention focuses on supporting individuals to engage in the activities that bring them joy in despite the challenging thoughts and feelings they have. The idea behind this is that the more joy/rewards we gain from engaging in these behaviours, the more likely we are to continue with them. This outcome brings with it less engagement in behaviours that are associated with less favourable results.
