TFCBT in Miami, FL

What Happens During TF-CBT?

Each part of Trauma-Focused Behavioral Therapy can be broken down and explained using the acronym PRACTICE. These interventions are designed to gradually expose you and your child to process the traumatic experience(s) in a safe and therapeutic environment. You and your child will be separated during each session to meet with your tf cbt certified therapist. That is until the Conjoint Therapy Sessions portion of the TFCBT model. This is to help you both prepare separately to unpack and discuss the trauma and effects of the trauma with your therapist. Here’s a preview of each component of the TF-CBT Model:

P – Psychoeducation and Parenting Skills

Your child will learn psychoeducation regarding their specific trauma experience. Such as knowing signs and trauma symptoms, behavioral and emotional responses due to trauma, and statistics of the same event happening to other children. Caregivers will learn similar psychoeducation as well as gain parenting skills for being able to respond to their child’s negative or concerning behavior after trauma has happened.

R – Relaxation

Both you and your child will learn specific relaxation techniques to help your child begin to regulate emotions, calm down, and manage stress such as breathing exercises, Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR), or guided meditation and imagery.

A – Affective Expression and Modulation

You and your child will learn specific emotions related to trauma such as fear, anger, and sadness, and how to effectively show and regulate these emotions in healthy ways.

C – Cognitive Coping Skills and Processing

You and your child will learn how to:

• understand the link between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

• identify inaccurate thoughts, distorted thinking, and negative beliefs

• use different healthy strategies to cope with inaccurate thoughts, distorted thinking, and negative beliefs.

T – Trauma Narrative and Processing

Your child will create a trauma narrative of their choosing (either a written story, picture book, song, etc.) focusing on discussing specific details of the trauma to express and process the trauma. This is typically done in multiple sessions where your child and therapist will work to identify more distorted cognitions or negative beliefs your child may still have toward the traumatic event. You and your therapist will read your child’s trauma narrative together before the conjoint therapy sessions. This will help you also process your child’s account of the trauma before they can read the narrative to you and your therapist together. In the end, this further helps regulate your reaction to your child’s narrative.

I – In-Vivo Exposure

Often when traumatic events occur, children will avoid specific people, places, things, or events that remind them of the trauma. The In-Vivo Exposure session is designed to further gradually expose your child to these specific trauma reminders. This is done to decrease their negative emotional responses to those reminders. As well as manage emotional reactions to future reminders.

C – Conjoint Therapy Sessions

You and your child will finally be joined together in a session with your therapist. Where you will continue to work on maintaining healthy attachments and relationship skills with each other.

E – Enhancing Safety

You and your child will develop a plan together to increase their safety skills. As well as learning how to avoid future trauma, stay safe, and continue to heal, grow, and adapt to new or changing environments that may affect or remind them of the trauma they experienced. If you believe you and your child would benefit from Trauma Focused Behavioral Therapy, reach out to our caring TF CBT-certified therapists to schedule a consultation and begin the healing process.