STAT
Featured STAT Therapist:
Kate Langhart
This month, I take joy in presenting to you, an amazingly insightful and professionally superb clinician, Kate Langhart, who is currently practicing in New Jersey. I have known Kate for many years now, since she first contacted me about reviewing some of the material about attachment that she was including in her master's degree thesis. Kate worked under my direction for two years, during which time I learned much from her creative, thoughtful, and always client-centered therapy. She is a superior clinician and I feel honored to be able to call her my friend.
The mental health practice of Kate Langhart, LCSW, specializes in helping parents and children emotionally bond and attach to create healthy, loving, parent-child relationships. Kate is dedicated to supporting children and families as they recover from the effects of early childhood traumas including abuse, neglect and family upheaval. Kate has been trained and is well practiced in the STAT™ method of evaluating and treatment complex trauma and breaks in attachment, especially as they exhibit themselves in foster and adoptive family living situations.
In the format of STAT™, Kate is educated, trained, and well practiced in the therapeutic techniques of attachment therapy, trauma therapy, including EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and NET (NeuroEmotional Technique). Ms. Langhart is also an expert in Narrative Therapy, and has training and experience in the practice of EEG Biofeedback (Neurofeedback) for treatment of anxiety, complex trauma, and disorders of attachment. Kate is an excellent diagnostician, and incorporates a multi-assessment model in her work with children and families.
Kate is also a registered clinician with ATTACh, the Association for the Treatment and Training in the Attachment of Children.
Meet: Kate Langhart, LCSW
Child and Family Therapy of NJ
26 Millburn Ave.
Springfield, NJ 07081
973.908.5209
klanghart@cftnj.com
Dr. Lark Eshleman developed the STAT (Synergistic Trauma and Attachment Therapy) model of therapy for reactive attachment disorder (RAD). STAT seeks to enhance parental attachment by first and foremost promoting trust. The goals of STAT are as follows:
- Teaching and modeling for the family the experiences of providing a predictable, nurturing, and supportive environment; raising a child with RAD requires learning parenting skills that are often counterintuitive to the ways we raise children without RAD
- Reforming the child's inner working model (what he or she believes about him or herself) from negative to positive
- Reducing the levels of hyper vigilance and hyperactivity ingrained in the child's brain
- Educating, supporting, and nurturing the family in order to best nurture the child
- Treating the child at his or her emotional, not chronological, age
- Working with other professionals in the child's life to make sure everyone is, as much as possible, working in concert with each other
Theoretical Constructs
STAT combines theoretical constructs from areas such as affect regulation (Schore), attachment (Bowlby), attunement (Siegel, Hughes), behavior modification (Skinner), cognitive (Beck, Ellis), coherent narrative (Main, May), dyadic developmental psychotherapy (Hughes, Becker-Weidman), interactive repair (Tronick), internal working model (Bowlby), and therapeutic relationship (Siegel). STAT uses all SAFE available therapies and services for optimal interplay of therapeutic support for clients and their families and considers the combination of interventions and the timing and sequence of the interventions that together equals a greater positive effect than the sum of the parts.
Current STAT Therapies
- Attachment Tx
- EEG Biofeedback
- EMDR & Trauma Therapies
- Narrative Tx
- Systematic Desensitization
- Group Tx
- Cognitive-Behavioral Tx
- Trauma-Art-Narrative Tx (TANT)
- Family Tx
- Parent/Family Education
- Body Work (eg: Cranial Sacral NeuroEmotional Technique)
Where to Start
- Start with Play!
- Stay structured until you know how well regulated the child and relationship are.
- Check out Theraplay® first.
Why Structured Play?
- Research on non-structured play therapy
- Cross-cultural infant-parent interaction in infancy that nurtures proper neurological development
- Allows for on-going family/parent education.
- Allows therapist to help parent learn/re-learn emotional regulation in the child-parent relationship
- Gives therapist chance to constantly assess and provide interactive repair with child
- Gives therapist chance to constantly assess and provide guidance and support for parents
- Lets you model trust-building through play
- Lets therapist guide child/dyad to return to "safe" time in child's life (or create it for the first time)
More information on the STAT model is available through Dr. Eshleman's award-winning book Solving the Puzzle, which you can purchase here.
Download PDF: STAT for Broken Attachments