From the Therapist's Chair: Sheila Wessels on Child Parent Relationship Therapy
At Ensemble Therapy, we care deeply about the “why” behind our practice of counseling. We believe there is not a “one-size-fits-all” approach to counseling; each therapist views the counseling process and their clients through a unique lens formed from years of education and experience.
This means that as a client, you can choose the counselor who is the best fit for you or your child. While this freedom to choose the best-fit may sound nice at first, it can be difficult to know how to choose when there seem to be so many ways to do therapy. Not only are there lots of theories on how to practice counseling, often the language behind counseling theories is difficult to understand and apply without any previous background knowledge.
As the client or the caregiver of a child client, you deserve to know and understand how your counselor practices therapy. Counseling exists for the growth and well-being of you, your family, and your community; therefore, counseling should be accessible and easy to understand for the greater public. In an effort to make our counseling practice more accessible and easy-to-understand for our clients, we want to introduce you to our counselors and their respective approaches to counseling.
Throughout the next several months, we’re going to take you through interviews with each of our therapists so you can learn the “why” behind their practice of counseling. This week, you’ll get to know a little more about Sheila Wessels, Senior Therapist at Ensemble Therapy. We hope you enjoy getting to sit a moment in the therapist’s chair and learn a little bit about counseling from our eyes.
About Sheila
Sheila is a Senior Therapist at Ensemble Therapy and has been on the ET team since July 2019. As an Austin native, she stayed in the Hill Country to receive her Masters in Professional Counseling from Texas State University. With 15 years of experience in public education, Sheila views the child and their family through a systemic lens. She loves working with the child's "village" and recognizes the importance of the child's environment and community in their lifelong development. Her practice with children and families is trauma-informed and based in Child Parent Relationship Therapy, Trust-Based Relational Intervention, and the Neurosequential Model. For Sheila, the best part of being a counselor is creating a safe and welcoming space for you or your child to be heard and understood.
What is your theory/approach to therapy?
I practice from a person-centered foundation with clients which highlights the relationship as the vehicle for change and the importance of a genuine, accepting, and empathetic environment. I provide a safe space for clients to explore their experiences, needs, wants, and desires, trusting that they are the expert on themselves. As a therapist, I have had extensive training and education in child-centered play therapy, which is the developmentally appropriate implementation of person-centered therapy and based on the evidenced-based research of Virginia Axline, Carl Rogers, Louise Guerney, and Garry Landreth. In Jaclyn Sepp’s blog, From the Therapist’s Chair: Jaclyn Sepp on Person-Centered Therapy, she outlines the core principles that guide my work with each of my clients.
Using my person-centered foundation, I teach caregivers how they can utilize the therapeutic powers of play to strengthen family relationships and to promote individual wellbeing in the comfort of their own home - this is called Child Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT). CPRT is defined as “a unique approach used by professionals trained in play therapy to train parents and caregivers to be therapeutic agents with their own children through a format of didactic instruction, demonstration play sessions, required at-home play sessions, and supervision in a supportive atmosphere” (Landreth & Bratton, 2006).
Throughout CPRT, I observe, assess, and teach parents/caregivers basic person-centered play therapy principles and skills (including reflective listening, therapeutic limit setting, building children’s self-esteem) to enhance their family bond. When caregivers can create a nonjudgmental, understanding, and accepting environment with their child, personal growth and change occur for both the child and the caregiver.
Back in the 1900s Sigmund Freud brought a child’s dad into his son’s therapy sessions, but the roots of CPRT didn’t take hold until the 1960s when the focus of mental health was shifting to human well-being rather than mental deficits. Originally introduced as a treatment for children with social, emotional, and behavioral issues, Bernard & Louise Guerney found that the primary source of maladjustment for many children living with their families could be logically traced to interpersonal relationships within the family.
The Guerneys proposed an approach that focused on the present-day behavior and habits where families could learn relationship skills - which they coined “filial therapy.” Filial therapy provides focused attention on the child from a person who holds emotional significance, encouraging anxieties learned by the parental and caregiving influence to be unlearned, and also providing opportunities for miscommunications to be clarified to the child by the caregiver. Sue Bratton, Garry Landreth, Theresa Kellam, and Sandra Blackard adapted this model into a 10-session formalized treatment for training parents and caregivers called Child Parent Relationship Therapy.
CPRT is based on the premise that a secure Caregiver-child relationship is the curative factor for children’s well-being.
We know that all behavior is communication and all behavior makes sense in context, so getting an inside look into how family members are influencing each other can provide insight that an individual play therapy session might not achieve. Play is inclusive for children, and allows for a broader range of expression than can be communicated in words. Caregivers are taught to focus on the child rather than the problem, the present rather than the past, feelings rather than thoughts or actions, understanding rather than explaining, accepting rather than correcting, child’s direction rather than caregiver’s instruction, and child’s wisdom rather than caregiver’s knowledge. In CPRT children are able to flourish rather than fit into a particular mold.
While other models stress teaching or problem solving, CPRT emphasizes the caregiver-child relationship. It assumes that a caregiver has more emotional significance to their child than a therapist, so why not allow caregivers an opportunity to influence their child positively through foundational therapeutic skills? CPRT empowers caregivers and parents to help their children! The focus is on changing the parent or caregiver, rather than the child. Caregivers work to understand their child’s needs rather than focusing on the behavior. By fostering a child’s internal locus of control, the caregiver does not need to establish external controls to limit undesirable behaviors.
Children are not free to explore, to test boundaries, to share frightening parts of their lives, or to change until they experience a relationship in which their subjective experiential world is understood and accepted. CPRT can help with relationship problems within a family, depressive symptoms, oppositional behavior, family reunification, single caregiving, attachment disruptions, foster care and adoption, and adjustment during & after divorce.
In CPRT, the child is able to:
Better understand and communicate feelings
Accept themself more completely
Feel more secure
Solve problems
Gain mastery
Be responsible for their own actions
Change maladaptive behaviors to more proactive ones
Become more interpersonally competent
In CPRT, the parent or caregiver is able to:
Improve their understanding of child development
Develop more realistic expectations
Become more receptive to children’s feelings and experience
Better accept children and their behavior
More skillfully communicate to children their understanding and acceptance
More effectively communicate their own experiences and needs
Generally improve their caregiving skills and functioning
In CPRT, the family is able to:
Feel more secure and comfortable with each other
Have better relationships with each other
Trust, accept, respect, and be open to others
Be more intimate with each other
Be more independent
Acknowledge the importance of the family relationships
Reduce stress and conflicts
Shift the family’s interactional system to one that is more positive, functional, and proactive
How did you come to practice from this theory? What drew you to it?
I was drawn to CPRT for a few reasons. First, I love working with parents and caregivers. As play therapists, we are taught in our very first class how to respond to our clients in ways that allow them to feel heard, seen, and validated. We use responses that help build esteem from within and responses that communicate to our client, “You can do this!” We shouldn’t be keeping these skills and responses to ourselves, we should be teaching them to caregivers. By using these skills, caregivers validate their children's feelings and communicate an understanding. This reduces the need of the child to communicate their need for understanding through big behaviors all the while strengthening the caregiver child relationship. Win for all!
I love sharing my own personal caregiving experiences with clients whether they be wins or fails. Yes, even therapists make mistakes with their own kids, but like CPRT teaches us, “What’s most important may not be what you do, but what you do after what you have done,” meaning, we all make mistakes but how we handle the mistake will be what is most important.
Lastly, I am a teacher at heart! CPRT is divided up into two components: didactic and group processing. CPRT allows me to take what I have learned as a therapist and teach it to parents and caregivers. I love that CPRT combines my passions of caregiving, helping children and families feel better emotionally, and teaching. Because of this, I’m currently in training at the University of North Texas to become Certified CPRT Practitioner.
What is your favorite thing about this theory?
What I like most about this theory is that it focuses on the strengths of the caregiver and child relationship. A good rule of thumb is “focus on the donut not the hole,” meaning, focus on what is there not what is missing. Often we focus on the problem, all that is going wrong but miss what is going right. For example, caregivers learn to use “Esteem Building” statements that focus on encouragement rather than praise and help build on the child’s strength from within.
How does your theory view people and their capacity for change and growth?
CPRT is grounded in Child Centered Play Therapy (CCPT) that helps caregivers to create and strengthen the relationship with their child. When we focus on what is right, we focus on what we are capable of and work from our strengths. Our strengths are what propel us forward and help us build new strengths. I believe we all have it within us to make change, we need to know and believe that we can through the support of others who believe it too. CPRT focuses on the needs of the child rather than the symptom.
What client is your theory best suited for?
CPRT is best suited for children ages 3-8; however, it has been adapted to be used with toddlers and preadolescents. CPRT is shown to be effective with diverse populations:
Adoptive families (Carnes-Holt & Bratton, 2014)
Low-income Latino immigrant families (Ceballos & Bratton, 2010)
African-American families (Sheely-Moore & Bratton, 2010)
Israeli families (Kidron & Landreth, 2010)
Teen moms (Landreth & Bratton, 2006)
Families staying in domestic violence shelters (Landreth & Bratton, 2006)
CPRT demonstrates moderate to large treatment effects on:
Decreasing parental and caregiving stress (Landreth & Bratton, 2006)
Reducing children’s behavior problems, including aggression (Landreth & Bratton, 2006; Bratton, Landreth, & Lin, 2010)
Decreasing children’s depression and anxiety (Landreth & Bratton, 2006)
Enhancing parental and caregiving empathy (Landreth & Bratton, 2006)
Improving overall family satisfaction and communication (Cornett & Bratton, 2014)
References:
Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) Treatment Manual by Sue C. Bratton & Gary L. Landreth
https://cpt.unt.edu/child-parent-relationship-therapy-certification
Bratton, S., Landreth, G., & Lin, Y.D. (2010). What the Research Shows about Child Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT): A Review of Controlled Outcome Research. In J. Baggerly, D. Ray, & S. Bratton (Eds.), Child-Centered Play Therapy Research: The Evidence Base for Effective Practice (pp. 269-294). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Carnes-Holt, K., & Bratton, S. (2014). The Efficacy of Child Parent Relationship Therapy for Adopted Children with Attachment Disruptions. Journal of Counseling and Development, (92), 328-337.
Ceballos, P. L., & Bratton, S. C. (2010). Empowering Latino Families: Effects of a Culturally Responsive Intervention for Low-Income Immigrant Latino Parents on Children’s Behaviors and Parental Stress. Psychology in the Schools, 47(8), 761–775.
Cornett, N. & Bratton, S.C. (2014). Examining the Impact of Child Parent Relationship Therapy on Family Functioning. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 40(3), 302-318.
Ginsberg, B.G. (1997). Relationship Enhancement Family Therapy. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Guerney, B. G. Jr. (1969). Filial therapy: Description and rationale. In B. G. Jr. Guerney, (Ed), Psycho-therapeutic agents: New roles for nonprofessionals, parents and teachers (pp. 450-460). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Guerney, B. G. Jr., Guerney, L., & Andronico, M. (1999). Filial therapy. In C. Schaefer, (Ed), The therapeutic use of child's play (pp. 553-566). Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Kidron, M., & Landreth, G. (2010). Intensive Child Parent Relationship Therapy with Israeli Parents in Israel. International Journal of Play Therapy, 19(2), 64–78.
Landreth, G., & Bratton, S. (2006) Child Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) Treatment Manual: A 10-Session Filial Therapy Model. New York: Routledge.
Sheely-Moore, A., & Bratton, S. (2010). A Strengths-Based Parenting Intervention with Low-Income African American Families. Professional School Counseling, 13(3), 175–183.
VanFleet, R. (1994). Filial therapy: Strengthening parent-child relationships through play. Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Press.
Interested in booking a session with Sheila?
SHEILA WESSELS, MED, LPC-S, RPT-S™ (SHE/HER/HERS)
Sheila Wessels is a Licensed Professional Counselor Supervisor (LPC-S) and Registered Play Therapist Supervisor™ (RPT-S™). She received her Master’s Degree in Professional Counseling from Texas State University (CACREP Accredited Program) as well as her Bachelor’s Degree in Education. She has had many years of experience with children of all ages and backgrounds. Prior to becoming a therapist, Sheila worked for 15 years in public education, 12 years as a Professional School Counselor and 3 years as an Elementary School Teacher.
