Today was the first day of training my 7th cohort of PCIT trainees at Centerstone. I am fortunate this year to have a co-trainer, a Certified PCIT Therapist I previously trained at Centerstone who will be pursuing training as a Level I Trainer. We focused today on overview of PCIT, assessment in PCIT, and the skills used in Child Directed Interaction (CDI). We elicited feedback from trainees regarding how using the CDI skills made them feel. You can see all of the positive results of these skills when used among trained professionals with each other. Imagine now that you are a child whose parents are using these skills with you a little bit every day. Imagine you are a parent using these skills with your child for a condensed period of time each day. Both individuals leave the interaction feeling the ways you see listed. Sure, it can feel 'awkward' and 'confusing.' Keep in mind these are therapy skills, and therapy should be uncomfortable at some level or another, but the over-arching theme is that of being recognized, heard, supported, and in-the-moment. We have another day-and-a-half of workshop training, and then trainees will start seeing families for PCIT and receive 20 hours of live supervision with me while conducting sessions. This is a strong cohort, and I'm excited to watch them all grow as PCIT therapists.

Thanks to extra funds within our early childhood grant, we were fortunate enough to be able to purchase toys for families we see in PCIT that do not have toys at home to conduct the required homework for PCIT. We now have Special Time bags to give to these families, and we organized the contents of the bags according to age. Thanks to my colleague, another Certified PCIT Therapist I trained, for helping choose appropriate toys to order and getting these bags ready for use. We had fun taking some time out of our busy day putting these together, and I can't wait to give them to the families we serve who truly need this resource.

Here's what I love about this after-session photo of a PCIT session... you can literally see the trail of the child's interest in the therapeutic materials through the session. Blocks, to food, to Potato Heads. All the bins are emptied out. They used every single toy in the room. This child did not have much organized play when we began treatment. Way to build organized exploration of materials! The effects of PCIT fascinate me every.single.day.

So, there's a big push for concurrent documentation where I work. I've come to appreciate this skill more and more over the years as it lessens the workload outside of sessions, allowing more time to be spent providing clinical care. To make this easier for myself and the PCIT clinicians at my agency, I have developed note templates for every session based on the integrity checklists in the protocol. When I receive feedback from chart audits, clinicians, supervisors, etc. about the notes, I update them. Tonight after work, my older cat, Tiger, was not having it. Tiger says, 'No working on PCIT note templates' as he lies on top of my laptop. Guess updating is done for tonight!

It's exciting times at Centerstone! We have officially opened a PCIT Clinic at a second location on the south end of the city:  9702 Stonestreet Rd., Louisville, KY 40272. I will be providing live supervision at this location to support a PCIT trainee in meeting the PCIT International training requirements to become certified. As you can see from the photo to the right, we have strong administrative support for expanding PCIT across our agency; they held a ribbon cutting for the opening of the new PCIT room! My hope is that this allows us to reach more families in Louisville with this amazing intervention. 

Nothing too spectacular about this mess. It's quite mild for the end of a session with a young child who struggles with behavioral dysregulation. Take note of the soft toys; this child has been throwing toys around the room since we started, and today they earned back a more favorable toy:  a food set! They played safely with it the whole session. High five for success!