Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP) - Level 1

Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP) can help children who have been hurt and/or neglected within their families in their early years. Children can be traumatized by these experiences and find it difficult to feel safe and secure within their new families. Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy has been developed by Dan Hughes over the past twenty years. It is based on a theoretical understanding of attachment and intersubjective relationships; and the impact of developmental trauma.

In DDP the therapist helps the child's relationship with its parents/caregvivers. He does this by talking with the child using an affective-reflective (a-r) dialogue. This is a conversation that involves feeling as well as thinking. The therapist explores all aspects of the child’s life; safe and traumatic; present and past. The therapist and parents’ intersubjective experience of the child helps the child get a different understanding. This becomes integrated into her autobiographical narrative. This in turn becomes more coherent.

In this way the child experiences healing of past trauma and achieves safety within current relationships. The conversations and interactions (verbal and non-verbal) within the therapy room are all based upon PACE. This means that the therapist will be playful, accepting, curious and empathic.

He will talk in a way that is like telling a story rather than giving a lecture. Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy therefore involves the child and parents working together with the therapist. The child gains relationship experience which helps her to grow and heal emotionally. Family members develop healthy patterns of relating and communicating. This in turn leads to a less feelings of fear, shame or need to control within the family. Family members become open to each other’s inner life as well as their outward behaviour. The child is helped to respond to current experience and memories of past experience flexibly instead of through rigid and repetitive responses.