Child and Family Therapy

Children who have experienced trauma, loss, or disruption carry those experiences with them, sometimes in ways they can’t yet put into words. Therapy gives them space to process what they’ve been through, build coping skills, and start to heal. Ariel’s therapy team works with children, youth, and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) of all ages, genders, and cognitive abilities. The most common reasons people come are anxiety, depression, and trauma, including trauma rooted in removal and foster care placement.

Ariel brought therapy in-house because the children in its care needed it. At one point, most children in Ariel’s foster homes were seeing a therapist, and finding a qualified one in this region was getting harder. So Ariel built its own team.

That team knows foster care from the inside. Many of Ariel’s therapists have worked in the child welfare system, and they understand the layers a placement adds to a child’s life: the disruption, the complicated emotions around family time, the work of learning to trust again. So less time goes to context, and more goes to the work that helps.

That understanding reaches past the child. Foster parents get a therapist’s view of what they’re seeing at home, birth parents working to bring their children home can find support of their own, and a foster family saying goodbye to a child can get help with the loss.

Because therapy sits inside the same organization as foster care and family time, therapists can talk through what a child needs as it comes up. When a bedtime routine starts unraveling, a case manager can talk to the child’s therapist down the hall the same day. After a hard session, the therapist walks the child out to the foster parent’s car and takes sixty seconds to share what matters. For a child who has learned not to count on things staying the same, steady appointments with a therapist who shows up can be where trust begins.

Ariel’s therapy team uses evidence-based approaches tailored to each person’s needs, developmental stage, and therapeutic goals. Children, youth, and adults with I/DD may take part in one or a combination of these approaches, based on what will serve them best.

The team also includes therapists trained in these approaches:

• I/DD-Specific Therapy, Evidence-Based | Approaches adapted for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, shaped around each person’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral needs to support mental health and quality of life.
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Evidence-Based | Builds skills in four areas (mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness) to help people manage intense emotions, reduce self-harm, and improve relationships. It’s often used for depression, impulsive behavior, and suicidal thoughts. Watch a quick overview.
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Evidence-Based | Helps people notice unhelpful patterns in their thinking and behavior and practice new ones, building problem-solving skills, confidence, and practical ways to cope with what’s happening now.
• Trauma-Focused CBT (TF-CBT), Evidence-Based | A version of CBT built for trauma. People work through trauma-related symptoms step by step, often with a caregiver involved, to ease the emotional and behavioral reactions that can follow a traumatic experience.
• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Evidence-Based | While a person recalls a distressing memory, the therapist guides bilateral stimulation (eye movements, tapping, or pulsing devices) to help the brain reprocess it so it carries less distress. EMDR was first developed to treat trauma.
• Child-Centered Play Therapy (CCPT), Evidence-Based | Play is how young children express what they can’t yet say. The child leads and the therapist follows, in a safe space where the child can explore feelings and build coping skills at their own pace.
• Trust-Based Relational Intervention® (TBRI®), Evidence-Based | A relationship-based model for children who have experienced trauma, built on three principles: empowering, connecting, and correcting. It helps caregivers and therapists meet a child’s needs in ways that build trust.

Therapy at Ariel often happens alongside foster care, family time, mentoring, or behavioral support. When it does, the people on a child’s team talk to each other, so families don’t have to tell the same story to each of them, and what’s happening at home or school can shape the next session. Only what’s relevant to care gets shared, and some conversations, like a therapist meeting with a mentor, happen only with a signed release.

Therapy also works on its own, for children and families who come to Ariel for therapy alone.

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