Thinking Here and Now
Conversations with innovators in psychotherapy

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Alicia Lieberman is the senior developer of Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP),   a relationship-based, trauma-informed treatment for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers who are experiencing mental health problems or are at risk for such disturbances. Usually, these disturbances are caused by exposure to traumatic events, environmental adversities, parental mental illness, maladaptive parenting practices, and/or discordant parent-child temperamental styles.

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CPP starts with a four- to six-session assessment and engagement period. This introductory stage constitutes the foundational phase of treatment and includes individual sessions with the parent, with the goal of co-creating a treatment plan based on a shared understanding of the child's needs.

Within treatment, CPP makes use of a variety of intervention modalities such as: translating behavioral meanings, using play, physical contact, and language, modeling appropriate protective behavior, insight-oriented interpretation, addressing traumatic reminders, retrieving benevolent memories, and emotional support. 

 

CPP is psychoanalytically oriented, but it integrates many perspectives such as attachment theory, developmental psychopathology, the field of adult-child trauma, and CBT.

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In this event Aner Govrin and Sharon Ziv-Beiman will discuss with Alicia Lieberman the principles of CPP, trauma in early age, reaactment of the parent's trauma in his or her relation to the infant, kinds of trauma and their impact on mental health, different intervention modalities, the challenges of openly talking with children and parents about their traumatic events.

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Alicia F. Lieberman, Ph.D., is Irving B. Harris Endowed Chair in Infant Mental Health, Professor and Vice Chair for Faculty Development at UCSF Department of Psychiatry, and director of the Child Trauma Research Program at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.

She directs the Early Trauma Treatment Network, a center of SAMHSA National Child Traumatic Stress Network and is the PI of the Infancy and Early Childhood Mental Health Consortium, a federal grant to create an early childhood mental health workforce in 10 rural counties of Northern California and other states with large rural populations. She is the senior developer of Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP), an evidence-based treatment for traumatized children aged birth-five broadly used nationally and internationally as an evidence-based treatment for traumatized young children and their parents or caregivers.

Her research involves treatment outcome studies in pregnancy and with traumatized young children from low-income and under-represented minority groups. She is the author of The Emotional Life of the Toddler, described as “groundbreaking” and now in its second edition to mark its 25th year in continuous print. She is also the author of numerous professional books and articles on pregnancy and early childhood mental health. Her work has been translated to several languages, including Arabic and Hebrew, and is used to increase understanding and foster dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians working with bereaved and traumatized young children and their families.

Born in Paraguay, she received her professional training in Israel and the United States. Her cross-cultural experience as a Jewish Latina informs her commitment to increasing access and raising the standard of care for low-income and minority children and families.  She is on national organizational boards and in 2019 was appointed to the California Early Childhood Policy Council.

She is the recipient of numerous awards, including in recent years the 2016 Rene Spitz Award for Lifetime Achievement from the World Association of Infant Mental Health (WAIMH), 2016 Hero Award from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, 2017 Whole Child Award from the Simms-Mann Institute, 2018 Blanche Ittleson Award from the Global Alliance for Behavioral Health and Social Justice, 2019 Paulina Kernberg Award from the Weill Cornell School of Medicine, and 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers and their Families.

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