Center for Attachment at Cornerstone Counseling Services

A Common Situation
Many adoptive parents are struggling to understand why their child seems unattached to them regardless of their devoted love and efforts to meet their child’s needs.  Before becoming parents, most people believe that their strong love for and commitment to their child will carry them through the challenges of parenting.  But in the case of attachment problems, typical parenting techniques applied in a loving home are usually not enough.

Our Goal
Professionals from Cornerstone’s Center for Attachment work on an outpatient basis with families dealing with the challenges of a poorly attached child or a child diagnosed with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD).  Working together with the family, staff members blend effective diagnosis, education, treatment and support into strategies that really work and make a difference in the life of each child.

Progress Through Understanding
The Center for Attachment is helping families put their lives back together every day.  We understand how emotionally devastating living with a poorly attached child can be for the whole family.  Children with attachment problems often have experienced some kind of trauma.  The trauma and the subsequent anxiety have resulted in a fear of attaching to even the most loving, nurturing parents.  This anxiety may manifest itself as an irrational need on the child’s part to be in control to avoid the risk of being hurt.

Progress Through Effective Parenting: Our Treatment Philosophy
Success is possible when parents become active, confident participants in the healing of their child’s attachment problems.  Our Parent Training Program is designed to teach parents how to help their children accept the love and guidance they so desperately need yet fight so hard to avoid.  Parents learn how to stop the power struggles that occupy so much of their daily existence.  As the battles for control wane, renewed energy is available for creating a more positive connection with the child.

Progress Involves the Entire Family
The Center for Attachment offers resources for all family members coping with the emotional roller coaster of life with a poorly attached child.  Family relationships are enhanced through such services as:

• Evaluation and diagnosis by a treatment team with expertise in attachment problems

• Parent Training Program

• Family therapy focused on understanding the child’s trauma and helping him or her heal

• School consultation and assistance with IEP development

• Neuro-training (biofeedback) to ease anxiety/attention concerns

• Psychiatric evaluation and medication monitoring

• Parent groups

• Sibling groups

• It’s Your Choice: A Group for Teens

• Fun and Focus: A group for mothers and children to foster bonding

• Weekend and intensive day-long workshops on understanding attachment problems

• Adult Reactive Attachment Disorder services

• Pre-adoption counseling services with a special focus on international/special needs adoption

Progress Paved by Experienced Professionals
The Center for Attachment staff includes psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers experienced and trained to work with children who have attachment problems.  The team is especially skilled in diagnosing and treating beyond initial symptoms, helping children understand their own unique life stories.

Center staff members are under the direction of Ray Kinney, M.S.  Ray has more than twenty years experience in treating children and families, working for nearly a decade with families who have a child with attachment problems.  He is a frequent presenter on the topic of Reactive Attachment Disorder.  He and his wife are the parents of four children, two of whom were adopted from Russia.  For more information, contact Ray Kinney at 262-542-3255 Ext.100 or by email at raywk2003@yahoo.com.