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Adolescents are infamous for their rebellious behavior. Indeed, much of the focus of therapy and clinical intervention with troubled adolescents focuses on their presumed need to rebel against their parents as they define their own identities. Yet this book argues that approaching work with adolescent clients with this presumption in mind is likely to miss the roots of their problem behavior. Rather than acting out against parental authority, adolescents in need of clinical help are most often dealing with their disappointing comparisons with their peers—the most relevant others to them during this period of their development. The book explains that it is countless interactions with their peers, at school and elsewhere outside of the home, that are the primary mode of psychological and social development for adolescents. Practitioners must recognize this crucial influence, and perhaps forgo traditional approaches, in order to better work with their adolescent clients. The books is a practical professional guide for how to approach and aid troubled teens by accessing the wealth of insight to be gained from understanding the influence of peer interactions on development and on behavior. Full of diagnostic categories and protocols for use with all types of adolescents, as well as guidance, tips, case studies, and offering a targeted model for adolescent group therapy, it provides professionals with all the tools they need to assist teens on their road to adulthood.

This is the third in a trilogy of books that chronicle the revolutionary changes in our mental health and human service delivery systems that have conspired to disempower staff and hinder client recovery. Creating Sanctuary documented the evolution of the Sanctuary Model therapeutic approach as an antidote to the personal and social trauma that clients bring to child welfare agencies, psychiatric hospitals, and residential facilities. Destroying Sanctuary detailed the destructive role of organizational trauma in the nation's systems of care. This book is a user-friendly manual for organizational change that addresses the deep roots of toxic stress and illustrates how to transform a dysfunctional human service system into a safe, secure, trauma-informed environment. At its heart, the Sanctuary Model represents an organizational value system that is committed to seven principles, which serve as anchors for decision making at all levels: non-violence, emotional intelligence, social learning, democracy, open communication, social responsibility, and growth and change. The Sanctuary Model is not a clinical intervention; rather, it is a method for creating an organizational culture that can more effectively provide a cohesive context within which healing from psychological and socially derived forms of traumatic experience can be addressed. Chapters are organized around the seven Sanctuary commitments, providing step-by-step, realistic guidance on creating and sustaining fundamental change. This book presents a roadmap to recovery for our nation's systems of care. It explores the notion that organizations are living systems themselves and as such they manifest various degrees of health and dysfunction, analogous to those of individuals. Becoming a truly trauma-informed system therefore requires a process of reconstitution within helping organizations, top to bottom. A system cannot be truly trauma-informed unless the system can create and sustain a process of understanding itself.