Real Life Heroes

A Developmental, Attachment-Centered Curriculum for Children with Traumatic Stress 

Real Life Heroes utilizes an activity-based workbook to help children with traumatic stress build the skills and interpersonal resources needed to re-integrate painful memories and to foster healing after abuse, neglect, family violence, severe illness, losses, deaths, or abandonment.  The workbook utilizes  creative arts and life story work to engage children and caring adults in trauma and attachment-centered therapy and to rebuild (or build) positive, enduring relationships between hurt (and often hurting) children and adults committed to guiding children into adulthood.  The curriculum integrates nonverbal and verbal modalities and helps children and caring adults move step-by-step from trauma narratives to life stories highlighting mastery,  helping others,  and nurturing relationships. 
 
Real Life Heroes was especially designed for children in child and family service programs who frequently lack safe, nurturing homes and secure relationships with caring and committed adults.  The model assists therapists and family members to recover and enhance family and cultural strengths and to promote skill building, attachments, and trauma processing.  The model can be used by programs and agencies as a prescriptive methodology to address primary goals including preventing placements, reuniting families, or finding alternate permanent homes for children who cannot return to biological parents.

Real Life Heroes helps children:

• recognize heroes within their families, communities and ethnic heritage and to develop a sense of hope that they can move past traumas
• develop skills to identify and express feelings and manage emotions utilizing drawings, rhythm, melodies, and movement
• use pictures, photos, and stories in a structured workbook format to tell the unique story of a child’s life strengthening positive memories of caring
• develop children’s capacity and confidence to cope with past, present, and future stressors and enables troubled children to transform from victims into ‘heroes’ within their families and communities

Interventions:

• engage caring adults to validate children by building on the caring of family members,  strengthening each child’s cultural and family heritage,  fostering an understanding of trauma, and reduction of shaming/blaming include specific steps to make it safe for children to work on healing including guidelines for involving aring adults and helping caring adults become mentors, protectors, and heroes for children
• engage children to work chapter by chapter on building competence and a stronger identity
• utilize activities to build critical skills to manage intense affective reactions  including affect recognition and regulation, acceptance and understanding of trauma reactions, self monitoring, working with peers and adults to overcome adversity, and helping others as a means of building self esteem
• utilize creative arts (drawing, color, rhythm, music, movement) to foster attunement between children and caring adults, strengthen positive memories of caring, increase capacity for problem resolution, share 'tough times,' and develop coping strategies strong enough to counter reminders, ‘triggers,’ to trauma reactions
• help practitioners utilize components of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) including psycho-education on trauma, affect regulation, social skill training, changing dysfunctional beliefs, progressive desensitization, and telling the story by providing a structured curriculum and child-friendly workbook
• can be easily integrated with other component-based trauma-focused therapies and home-based family preservation, therapeutic foster family, residential treatment, and juvenile justice programs and can be utilized to build the security and basic skills necessary for trauma-focused and evidence-supported interventions such as TF-CBT or EMDR.

The manual and workbook were designed to prevent or treat traumatic stress with children and adolescents who function developmentally between ages 6-12 and who have experienced losses, neglect, abuse,  violence, illness, or disasters including: 

• children identified as abused, neglected, or PINS/JD
• children with Complex PTSD, ‘Developmental Trauma Disorder’
• children at risk of placement
• children placed into foster families, residential treatment centers, psychiatric hospitals, crisis residences, or runaway/homeless youth programs
• families working in pre-and post-adoption counseling
• older adolescents, preschool children, and children who have learning disabilities utilizing adaptations outlined in the manual

The manual was designed to help therapists strengthen caring adults, or when necessary, to search for caring adults and engage them to rebuild attachments and provide long term guidance, nurture, and safe homes.  The manual also provides a curriculum that can be used as the framework for  an 8-12 month trauma therapy practicum for graduate students.  This would ideally include an introduction to trauma for group or foster care staff, e.g. the Child Welfare Trauma Toolkit (NCTSN, 2008), a 2 day workshop on Real Life Heroes, review of the Real Life Heroes Practitioner’s  Manual (Kagan, 2007b) and Rebuilding Attachments for Traumatized Children (Kagan, 2004), completion of the Real Life Heroes life storybook (Kagan, 2007b) by the intern, and weekly supervision in use of the model by a clinical supervisor with advanced training in trauma therapy and use of this model. 

  Real Life Heroes  is listed in the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration’s  (SAMHSA) National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices (http://www.nrepp.samhsa.gov/programfulldetails.asp?PROGRAM_ID=226 ),  the SAMHSA National Center for Trauma-Informed Care manual "Models for Developing Trauma-Informed Behavioral Health Systems and Trauma-Specific Services," and as an Evidence-supported and Promising Practice by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (http://www.nctsnet.org/nctsn_assets/pdfs/promising_practices/RLH_General.pdf).