Linking Lives/Building Attachment

Does your child's early history include some form of trauma or neglect?  That history can interfere with a child's ability to form a healthy attachment with his or her caregiver, which can in turn lead to difficulties in forming relationships.  If your child struggles with

  • Persistent aggression
  • Rule-breaking
  • Withdrawn behaviour
  • Anxiety and depression
  • Social problems
  • Thought problems
  • Attention problems

it may be as a result of attachment difficulties.  If so, you may wish to consider using comprehensive Shalem's Linking Lives/Building Attachment treatment supports.

Linking Lives/Building Attachment is available to:

  • Long-term foster parents and their children
  • Adoptive children and their parents
  • Caregivers and children in kinship care
  • Parents and their biological children
  • Parents with attachment disorders due to trauma in their past

For more information about the treatment, download our brochure, or contact Shalem's Director of Attachment Services, Betty Brouwer (Hamilton area), or June Zwier (Durham region).

In addition to providing clinical treatment, a second goal of Linking Lives/Building Attachment is to help develop the capacity of all of us in the child-serving sector to do attachment-specific work.  To that end, we have partnered with Dr. Dan Hughes and Child and Adolescent Services, a children's mental health service in Hamilton, to offer training in the Hamilton area by Dan Hughes. We are able to do this in part due to the collaboration of Sandra Webb Counselling. Dan offers compelling one-day workshops for parents and professionals, and three to four day workshops for clinicians.  After successful training events by Dan in 2008 and 2007,  we have asked Dan to return to Hamilton in February, 2010.  Watch for more information about date, place and registration on this page, and contact Betty if you are interested. 

Betty also does attachment-specific work with young at-risk mothers at Good Shepherd Centre's Angela's Place program in downtown Hamilton.

"What excites me is that Linking Lives/Building Attachment adds the latest cutting edge treatment for deeply hurt children to Shalem's long history of building health into families." Edward Hagedorn, MA, O.A.T.R., who integrates expressive arts and dyadic developmental therapy in his clinical practice, based in Cobourg, Ontario