Treatment
CPTCSA provides treatment and healing services for children and their families who have experienced inappropriate sexual touching and children and adolescents with sexual misbehavior or abusive behaviors.
CPTCSA provides
- individual counseling (victim and offender)
- group counseling (victim and offender)
- family psycho-education
- case conferences
- court preparation (victim)
Counseling will be provided at our office, at school, or at a peer agency.
Counseling issues include shame, guilt, interpersonal relationships, safety, setting boundaries, feelings, grieving, forgiveness, sexuality, building empathy, decision-making, impulse control, the court, and building self-esteem. Counseling can be single-session or over several months following assessment of client and all support systems. Counselors are trained and supervised social workers using a variety of methodologies based in the traumagenic dynamics.
Individual counseling is personalized and in-depth treatment, working to create a safe and trusting place for the child to share his/her thoughts and feelings with a therapist. The social worker counselor helps the child understand his/her feelings so that the child can move forward and find emotional healing. Individual therapy sessions are set based on the need of the client, although generally once a week. Sessions for younger clients average between thirty to forty-five minutes; sessions with older children last between forty-five minutes to an hour. A total of six to eight sessions is needed for assessment of the child’s presenting problems, after which, the course of the actual intervention (therapy) will be determined based on treatment goals, family support, child strengths, and other variables. The case and the progress of the client will be reviewed periodically to determine the need for further intervention or if therapy should be terminated.
Group counseling allows children struggling with the same issues to confront and work through their experiences together. This is powerful in the healing process because the sexually abused child often feels isolated from his or her peers. Therefore, sharing the experience in a group can lessen this loneliness. Group therapy sessions range between eight to fifteen sessions. Each group therapy session lasts for ninety minutes. Optimal group size is 6 – 8 members. Criteria for membership includes same-gender/age groups. and the child is not psychotic or mentally disabled. Before any child can join group therapy, a screening process will be conducted by the group facilitator.
What Every Sexually Abused Child Needs
- Someone who tells the child it was good to tell about the abuse.
- Someone who affirms the child that the abuse was not his/her fault.
- Someone who tells him/her that feeling sad and angry is all right.
- Someone who tells the child that s/he is not alone. There are many other children who have been sexually abused.
- Someone who tells him/her that he/she can say NO to sexual abuse.
- Someone who tells the child that sexual abuse is a crime.
- Someone to affirm the child that most symptoms are common responses to a sexually abusive experience.
TREATMENT SERVICES CAN HELP YOU BY:
- Providing a safe release of feelings.
- Overcoming negative and potentially self-destructive behavior.
- Helping you understand what part of your thinking has been affected by the abuse and help you correct those distortions.
- Helping you overcome self-blame and self-hatred.
- Helping you build a sense of trust in yourself and in a positive future.
- Enabling you to gain a sense of perspective about the abuse and to gain the emotional distance necessary to keep the trauma from hurting you in the future.
- Supporting you as you come to terms with your own sexuality, including good feelings surrounding sexual behaviors and the ability to discriminate healthy sexuality from abuse.
For problems that are very serious, psychiatric intervention may be necessary.
The young sexual offender treatment is provided in both individual and group counseling. Assessment with an abuse-focused approach will be based in The Sexual Abuse Cycle For Children, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, and Relapse Prevention. The goals for sex offense intervention are:
- develop an accurate understanding of the antecedent and patterns of abusive sexual behaviors
- build empathy for victims and reframe irrational cognitive beliefs (denial) about their sexual behaviors
- develop skills to manage internal and external triggers (events, thoughts and feelings) to prevent further sexual offending (relapse prevention).
Residential centers that refer clients are usually asked to support the counseling through participation of their own staff.
Fees are based on a sliding scale determined by capability.
Case conferences provide a second opinion and expanded expertise for difficult cases, held either at your office or with CPTCSA’s in-house treatment response team (social workers and psychiatrist)
Kids and Teen Court Awareness Program is a one-day session in a real court to prepare children (and their parents) to be witnesses in the crime committed against themselves.