Are you ready to put an end to the frustration, hopelessness, and fears about your child's future?
Excerpts from a Mother’s Journal
When I try to imagine my child’s future, a shudder of fear runs through my core. I envision homelessness, prison, drug and alcohol addiction, or sometimes even death. I see the path that we are on as a family, always reaching out to my child, always feeling like my efforts are slapped away with anger, and defiance. Sometimes when I am quiet and alone I weep because of the pain that we are stuck in and sometimes I even feel that my child hates me.
Oh God, it’s so scary to even write that. My child hates me, and sometimes I hate my child. No, I really don’t hate my child, but I hate this pain that we are stuck in. I try to put these feelings aside to be loving to my child, but it is so hard to find that loving place inside of me with all the pain. I can not continue to extend my love when I know it will be rejected. When I dare to look in the mirror, I barely recognize the person I’ve become. I had always pictured myself as a loving wife and mother, ready to support my child and my family through the tough times. What I see today when I look at my reflection is a very tired woman, struggling each day to find a moment of peace and happiness. I despise what I have become, I despise what my life has become. My marriage is suffering, near divorce on more than one occasion. My husband and I have some sort of conflict everyday. I am terrified that I am going to lose everything that I have ever hoped for. I feel like every day is a fight for survival.
Nation's Families in Crisis
Families across the nation are in crisis. Today’s parents are faced with more personal stress in their daily lives than ever before, their children faced with more stress in their personal lives both academically and socially. The family system is experiencing stress and pressure beyond its tolerance. There is clear evidence that traditional parenting and therapy approaches are having a limited impact in supporting families in their most desperate crisis. Doctors are prescribing more and more medication as the solution to calming behaviors which stems from emotional pain. Sending children away from the family for healing has become a crisis that matches that of our nations divorce rate.
Professionals continue to offer the same idea’s as solutions; consequences, rewards, timeout, and various scared straight tactics. When these solutions create no change, parents feel blamed. They are accused of not doing enough, of not being consistent in the approach. When the blame of parents is eliminated the child is deemed too damaged for help and is sent away with the plan of a life time of institutional care.
Families are begging for help, help that is effective, help of a different kind, help that creates healing; healing at the core level.
I know you care about your family. I know you realize the children of today are the future of our world. I know you do all that you know day in and day out to take care of your children and your family.
Has your child been diagnosed with:
- Reactive Attachment Disorder
- Oppositional Defiance
- Attention Deficiet Disorder
- Depression
- Anxiety
- BiPolar Disorder
- Aspergers
- Conduct Disorder
 Has your child been prescribed any number of medications in an effort to control the challenging behaviors associated with these diagnosises?
Has your child’s therapist encouraged lots of talking between you and your family members?
The key to helping your child heal is to address the emotion, not the behavior. Most professionals attempt this with traditional talk therapy.
A corner stone belief of Bryan Post’s Family-Centered Regulatory Parenting is that parents have the greatest ability to create healing for their family. Yes, that’s right. You have a greater ability to create emotional healing for your child than any therapist or doctor. You are the foundation for your family. Your relationship with your child is more significant than any other relationship. Your child may experience the greatest challenges in family relationships. But it is through these same familyrelationships that the greatest healing can occur.
Therapist Confesses 15 Years Of Ineffective Practice
I had been viewed as one of the top child and family therapists in the state. I had completed graduate school and continued my training with a respected professional who specialized in a particularly useful cognitive behavioral approach. I even had the 2nd highest score in the states history on my licensing exam.
Then I began my training with Bryan Post. At first, I thought some of his ideas were “out there”. The ideas did not fit the traditional “talk therapy”, cognitive behavioral, and cognitive restructuring paradigm of my comfort zone. Within the first month of training I had the privilege of joining him in a weekend session with a family whose child had just returned from 2 years in Residential Treatment Center (RTC). The family had discharged their child against medical advice. They felt that no progress was occurring. They were willing to try just about anything to save their son. Their son who had an extensive history of early childhood trauma, had been in RTC for 2 years, never being able to “earn level” for a home visit, only rarely “earning level” for going outside, receiving group, individual, and family therapy, and high doses of multiple medications to manage his behavior, all with no real progress, was coming home to work with Bryan Post for a weekend.
What I witnessed was amazing. In 15 years as a therapist working with families both in agencies, and in home-based services, I have never seen so much emotion expressed, processed, and integrated in such a short period of time. The family was able to get to things in 3 hours of work with Bryan, that I would have been lucky to see in 3 months of traditional therapy, and what occurred over the course of 4 days seems nothing short of a miracle. It’s been 5 years since that weekend; how is the family doing? Well, it wasn’t always easy for the family, but they were committed to a healing path. Healing not just of their son’s trauma, but his 4 siblings, as well as the parents. Within his first year home he began to live medication-free and gradually returned to public school full-time. He has since graduated high school and is working towards a naval career. I still hear from them periodically with poems written by the son, and stories of the family’s life. Imagine, if the parents would have taken the doctors advice and repared for a life of institutionalization of their son, where would he be?
What I say to all the families I worked with in my previous therapist life is, I am sorry. I am sorry I did not know then what I know now. I pray that I did you no harm, but now I see clearly how limited I was in my effectiveness due to my lack of knowledge.
— K. Lynn Stick, LPC
Ordinary Parents Can Create Extraordinary Healing
Take a GIANT step towards your happy family. The Post Institute for Family-Centered Therapy has developed a process to help you jump start your families healing; The Post Institute Attachment Parenting Camp. The POST Attachment Parenting Camp is a 2 day intensive hands-on learning experience. It has been proven that effective learning can only occur in two ways, through repetition, or emotional impact. The POST Attachment Parenting Camp offers both; repetition via the exclusive parenting camp educational material system, “Parent the Family Healer”; and emotional impact via the parent camp process. This camp is not for the faint of heart. Do not come and expect to sit on your booty-patoooty and listen to someone talk, blah-blah-blah-blah, for two days. Expect to be asked to stretch yourself intellectually and emotionally. Be prepared to be invited to consider your child and your family dynamics from an entirely new paradigm. Imagine what it was like when we discovered that the world really was round...wow, now that is a major shift in the paradigm for the human race. Imagine a paradigm shift of that magnitude for your family.
We are serious about your families well-being. We are serious about supporting you in creating healing for your family. We believe that by helping you, the parent, gain a new understanding of your child’s behavior, and by working along side you to re-establish the emotional foundation for your family, you can return home to lead your family on the healing path. Ordinary parents, provided with a new understanding, and a new way of approaching their children, can create extraordinary healing for their family.
Special Report In the past four years several agencies have sponsored professionals to attend our therapist camps. Last year Community Counseling Services, Hot Springs Arkansas sponsored a team of therapists to attend the Post Institute Attachment Therapist Camp. The team took the information and experience of the camp back to their agency and proposed a drastic transition. Since the agencies inception they had followed a “Love and Logic” parenting approach in their therapeutic foster homes. The freshly trained, eager, Post camp graduates proposed training their foster parents in this new Family-Centered Regulatory Parenting approach.
The transition took place over the course of one year. The following definitions will be helpful as you review the results: disruptions, defined as children having to leave the foster home due to unacceptable behavior, most typically to institutional care of some type. Crisis intervention, defined as crisis calls made by the family to the agency requiring a crisis visit by a professional to the home.
Phase 1 illustrates the number of disruptions and crisis intervention calls that occurred in twelve months averaged while operating from the “Love and Logic” parenting paradigm.
Phase 2 illustrates the number of disruptions and crisis intervention calls occurring in six months averaged while foster parents and their therapist team were being trained in Bryan Post’s Family-Centered Regulatory Parenting model.
Phase 3 illustrates the number of disruptions and crisis intervention calls occurring in six months averaged after the completion of training and full implementation of the new approach.
The results below were reported to the Post Institute for Family-Centered Therapy by Community Counseling Services, Hot Springs,Arkansas, lead researcher, Dane Nielson, LPC. The study involved 28 children and 14 families. Significant differences are indicated over the 12 month time frame involved in the study. Research will continue to validate findings.
About Bryan Post
"As an adopted child I grew up in a home loving home with loving parents. Unfortunately our home also became full of conflict and stress. Remarkably it wasn’t because I was setting fires, lying, stealing, and killing animals, All of which I was actively engaged in, but rather it was for another reason. The reason did not come to light until nearly thirty years later shortly after the passing of my father.
My entire life I witnessed my parents daily frustration when it came to parenting my sister. She was a challenge, but she did not engage in the degree of inappropriate behaviors that I did. However, it was not necessarily her behaviors that caused the problems. My sister, due to her own early trauma and adoption, was emotionally immature. She was quiet and withdrawn, and had very poor social skills for effectively relating to her peers. Not only this, but in the home she acted in very immature ways, talking incessantly, lying, making up stories, getting into things she was not supposed too. All of thesebehaviors were quite challenging to my parents. Not to mention the constant problems she experienced at school with peers and teachers. My parents experienced all the anxiety of constant phone calls from the school omplaining about my sister talking in class, getting poor grades, and stealing from the teachers desk.
Needless to say, by the time my sister was fifteen, the constant conflict became too much and she left ome. She didn’t fare much better on her own, in and out of jail several times before the age of eighteen. But that’s not the point of this message to you.
One day, thirty years later, shortly after the passing of my father, my mother stated during a heart to eart, that the one thing my sister needed but never received was understanding. She stated in an exasperated way, “We never understood who she was and what she needed. That’s why we struggledso much.”
You don’t have to struggle for years. At the POST Institute we’ve got the understanding that can help you create healing dynamics for your family that will last forever. I hope you’ll come and join us.
Bryan Post is an internationally recognized specialist in the treatment of emotionally challenged children and families. He is the founder of the Post Institute for Family-Centered Therapy, POST Educational Services, POST Treatment Homes, and serves as Clinical Director for Family First of Virginia Beach. He is an author, mentor, teacher, son, husband, and father.
IF YOU ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU’VE ALWAYS DONE, YOU WILL ALWAYS BE WHERE YOU’VE ALREADY BEEN.
“This weekend was a beginning of a new journey for me and my family. By understanding my own feelings, I can now begin to understand how my daughter feels most of the time if not all the time. Now I understand why my daughter does the things she does; the feelings behind her actions. By learning how to get regulated and stay that way, I can help my daughter to do the same. Instead of thinking negatively, we problem solve together. The boot camp was worth every penny. There are so many reasons to go, you will grow and be better for it. Do this for yourself, your spouse and your child.
--B.H., California
"What a radical departure from what we have learned up until now about Reactive Attachment Disorder and recommended therapy. You present a much more logical, compassionate, less confrontational, and more understandable approach than anything else we’ve learned. It appears to have a greater positive potential in effecting change in both the child and the parents. Thank you for all the time and commitment you’ve given to us directly and our child indirectly.”
--C.R., Colorado
“After four years of fighting my son, my heart was filled with hurt, sorrow, and pain to the point there was no room left for love. At the end of the boot camp, I actually feel joy! Imagine, joy in my heart again; a desire to love and give to my son again.”
–D.M., Kentucky
“Thank You! This was a life changing event. The butterfly is emerging from the cocoon. My life and my children’s lives will never be the same. May God bless you and your team as you work to bring peace, love and acceptance to all in need.”
—G.M., California
POST ATTACHMENT PARENTING CAMP
Become the Healer You Were Destined to Be
“Parent as Healer”
The Post Institute for Family-Centered Therapy, founded by Bryan Post, is committed to the healing of families. Family-Centered Regulatory Parenting, created by Bryan Post, is an approach to working with parents so that they may create healing for their child. Family-Centered Regulatory Parenting is an approach that is rooted in information from the field of neuroscience, incorporating research from Affect Regulation, Child Development, and Multi-Systemic Family Therapy. Family-Centered Regulatory Parenting has become widely recognized as one of the single most effective treatment models available for creating healing results for children with the most severe behaviors. Over 30,000 parents and professionals have attended lectures and training camps, gaining this revolutionary understanding and taking it into their homes, agencies and communities creating healing for families.
Here's just a few ways you will benefit by attending:
- Learn and experience an understanding that will jump-start your families healing.
- Learn how you, NOT your therapist, can be the primary catalyst to change for your child.
- Return home to create a therapeutic environment that promotes daily healing for your child.
- Relate to your child at an emotional level never before experienced in your family.
- Develop deep supportive connections with your partner.
- Restore the spark in your marriage, even if it has been missing for years.
- Experience a loving connection between you and your attachment challenged child.
- End the feeling of threat experienced in your parent child relationship
- Learn why even adoption at birth impacts a child’s emotional development.
- Learn why traditional parenting might be adding to your child’s stress, and what you can do differently.
- Gain specific understandings that will help you reduce and eliminate aggression.
- Gain specific strategies that will help you over come defiance and gain cooperation.
- Reduce and eliminate your fear and anxiety as your witness your child healing.
- Gain an understanding of sibling rivalry as it relates to the attachment challenged child and strategies to increase sibling harmony.
- Learn the understanding that can be applied to every challenging behavior your child presents.
- Restore the hope and love you felt when you first thought of having children.
- Learn exactly what your child needs when they are demonstrating challenging behaviors.
- Learn why traditional talk therapy will not meet your child’s needs.
Read What Parents Just Like You Had to Say:
We are grateful for the opportunity to pen this open letter to you. We participated in the Parent Boot Camp in December, 2004.
To truly convey the impact this therapeutic intensive had on our family, it would be best to first share with you what brought us to Florida for the Parent Boot Camp from our home in Northern California.
In a word, it was quite literally desperation. Our family is composed of two birth children ages 6 and 9 and two adopted children ages 10 and 12. Our adopted children are siblings and came to us at ages 5 and 6, although they came to us almost three years apart. Our son (now 12) came to us at age five with an abundance of documented abuse and neglect in his wake. He was born tox positive and had severe emotional issues that put the health and safety of other family members at risk. At age 10 he entered residential treatment for 18 months in a final, desperate attempt to get him (and us) help.
Diagnoses included: Reactive Attachment Disorder, Generalized Anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Mood Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, along with various forms of ADD. If we were to give a ballpark figure as to how much money went towards therapy, treatment, and related expenses it would be well over the $100,000 mark.
Therapeutic interventions included play therapy, narrative therapy, EMDR, attachment therapy, family therapy, psychotropic medications, SPECT brain scans and home schooling, along with the full implementation of “take back the control” attachment models that included 100% line-of-sight supervision, alarms on doors, etc. Everything we tried seemed like a failed experiment at best that left us no better off than when we began.
Ronda quit her job to take care of our emotionally draining children. Our general health suffered, along with loss of feelings of joy and well being. We had lost all hope that our situation could or would change. When we were faced with the choice of bringing our son home from residential treatment or finding a permanent long term care for him, my husband found out about Bryan Post and the Post Institute.
We jumped in feet-first (so to speak) at the Parent Boot Camp. We learned (and experienced) for the first time that the true underpinnings of our children’s behavior (and our stress) were trauma and fear. These two paralyzing co-creators of mayhem had destroyed our children’s ability to relate to others, define their own needs, seek comfort, and move beyond their severe abuse and neglect. After SEVEN YEARS in our home, our son was still paralyzed by his fear and my daughter was literally fighting for her very survival. We can honestly say that the Parenting Boot Camp is the Adoption Orientation we wish we could have had before we ever brought children into our home.
Through the experiential workshop Bryan provided, we finally “got it”. Not only were we for the first time able to understand our children, but we were able to understand ourselves and one another on a whole new level. Parenting these children was traumatizing and magnified pre-existing stressors in our lives and relationships to new extremes. Also, being the non-adopted siblings of these children (and the children of stressed-out parents) had also further traumatized all of our kids. We needed a newunderstanding to change the way we engaged all our children and we needed healing to stamp out the fear that was so pervasive in our children and our relationships with them.
Since our return home, things are very good. We have to work at it every day, but no one in the family is on any psychotropic medication and our one-on-one interactions are regularly warm and positive. Our oldest son is now living at home permanently and after failing fifth grade, he graduated from sixth grade with honors. He spontaneously smiles and last week, was thankful for the Slurpee brought to him at his soccer game. Our oldest daughter attended sleep away camp and spent most of her candy money on a phone card just so she could call home…she actually missed us! …and the other kids feel calmer and safer in this new “gentler” atmosphere.
The work that we did with Bryan and his team gave us as parents the ability to better understand all our children, to relate to their experiences, and connect with them like never before. We feel joy and hope for the first time in seven years, and a confidence that “we can do it!” What we learned from Bryan is understandable, makes sense, and it really works.
 When seeking help for your family, don’t make this your last resort (like we did), make it your first. It will truly change your life, and the lives of your children … and God willing, future generations in your family. You can’t afford not to invest the time in this endeavor. Go For IT!! You truly do have everything to lose. Don’t let this opportunity slip by. You won’t regret it!
With deep gratitude and encouragement,
Bill & Ronda Evans
Chico, California
(P.S. It has now been 5 years since our camp experience and our son continues to thrive academically, socially, and emotionally!)
Our Child has had an absolutely incredible miracle happen in his life! Before he went through Bryan Post’s program, he was on several medications for diagnosed mental illnesses. It was being recommended that our child be placed in a mental institution for at least a year or two because he was so out of control and nothing was helping. The school was threatening to send him to an alternative school. He was constantly lying, cheating, stealing and trying to hurt his younger brother. We even had to lock up items that we use on a daily basis, i.e.: kitchen knives, scissors, razors, etc., so that he wouldn’t be able to hurt himself or his younger brother. Life was completely impossible! We knew that our child had severe problems due to being sexually abused in his younger years. We just weren’t able to help him. He was seeing both a psychologist and a psychiatrist. Conventional therapy just wasn’t helping and he had been seeing them for several years. We even worked with Dr. Phil before he became Dr. Phil! We were desperate.
 We had our doubts that anything would help. Seeking help through Bryan Post has been the very best thing we could have even imagined. Our child immediately stopped harming himself and his brother, as well as, has not lied, stolen, or cheated since last June of 2004, when we went through Bryan’s program! After the boot camp we were even inspired to get our child off of his psychiatric medicines. With the support of our psychiatrist we were able to get our child off of all the drugs he was on and he hasn’t been back on them since. He doesn’t need them. It has been a whole year and not one incident has occurred! It’s absolutely unbelievable! His behavior is excellent! He is a very loving, kind-hearted, gentle child. The work that Bryan is doing in these children’s lives is remarkable. He is completely changing their road ahead and giving them an outstanding future for their life. Bryan is the best I’ve ever seen and unfortunately I’ve seen a lot!
Sincerely, Allie and Steven
(P.S. 5 years later and our son has blossomed into a wonderful young man. We couldn’t be happier or more proud of him!)
Play therapists, crime victim therapists, psychologists, psychiatrist, family psycho-therapy (which involved us watching our daughters from behind a window with no interaction from “family” unless it was play acting one-on-one), meds, teachers and many others. They all had the “answers” to our then, foster daughters behavior problems, but their meds increased and there wasn’t any healing after three years, just more anger and frustration. After many nights in tears and many prayers said, three days before the adoption of our two RAD daughters, I was invited to attend a camp being held by Bryan Post. “What the heck could he tell me that would be different from the many books I had read and the advice I had received?” I fought the invite, but in the end my adoption caseworker convinced me to go. Oh, my gosh!!!....this was the answer to the prayers I had been sending to the Lord for years. Finally!...someone who could explain the reasons behind the bad behaviors, someone who was not willing to mask the behaviors with meds, someone who believed that following their heart and trusting their gut and to do it from a love based place was the route to take. And like I have always believed, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you!” What a relief to hear sticker charts and consequences set the child up for more failure. To know what real “family therapy” was all about and how it worked. It finally all made sense! I was able to go into the courtroom that following Monday, with peace, with the knowledge and empowerment as a parent to know that our family was going to make it and we were going to heal.
— Darlene, Biological, Adoptive, and Foster Mom of 6
Be one of the FIRST 7 to sign up for either of the camps and join America's Foremost Child Behavior Expert for Dinner and a Limo on Saturday Night!
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Deborah Chelette-Wilson
Dallas, TX
July 10th and 11th 2009 |
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Kimberly Erickson-Nichols
Lacrosse, WI
August 13th and 14th 2009 |
LaDonna Hall and Donna Boggs
Norton, VA
September 11th and 12th, 2009 |
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If you are like most parents who come to us in desperation you can find peace. There is hope, there is help.
This Camp is backed by Bryan’s Unheard of, NO RISK 110% Guarantee:
If you are not completely satisfied by the end of the camp you will receive a 110% Refund!
Register Today
 ...............................................$997.00 Individual (Discounts available for Inner Circle Members)
...............................................$1,497.00 Couples (Discounts available for Inner Circle Members)
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