What Namaste Does

Namaste offers services and programs designed for children who have difficulty building trusting relationships and appropriate attachments. It is the vision of Namaste to move children and families from hurt to healing.

In order to fulfill our mission and vision, it our goal to become recognized as the best provider of quality attachment based services for children & families in our culturally diverse communities while remaining financially sound.

Namaste embraces the following Core Values:

Healthy child playing

Honor families, their cultures & traditions
Build on children’s resiliency
Support the recovery of families
Work in partnership
Work in collaborations
Use relationships to foster change
Do No Harm
Offer healing

In 1989, Namaste was established as a residential facility in Tome, New Mexico serving children unable to remain in their homes due to multiple problems including the inability to build trusting relationships and form appropriate bonds. Since that time, the organization has grown to include a variety of services for children and their families. To date the agency has expanded, contributing to communities throughout the state of New Mexico by establishing regional offices in: Aztec, Albuquerque, Gallup, Farmington, Las Vegas, Santa Fe and Taos, with the Corporate Office located in Los Lunas.

Our Treatment Foster Care (TFC) program allows children and families to be helped through services delivered by specially trained treatment foster parents in a licensed TFC home. The child lives in a community while receiving services and support provided by Namaste, inclusive of, but not limited to, individual and family therapy, respite care, and medication management. A multi-disciplinary team comprised of Namaste Clinicians, Treatment Coordinator, Treatment Foster Parents, Guardian, Parents/Caregivers meet monthly to assess the child’s needs and formulate individualized plans for treatment, discharge and permanency. Our Treatment Coordinators provide intensive supports including teaching, training and coaching children and their families in acquiring, enhancing and maintaining the social and behavioral skills needed to function successfully at home, school and in the community.

Outpatient Therapy, specializing in relationships and attachment interventions and strategies, is available at Namaste for children, couples and families. Outpatient services are culturally respectful, developmentally appropriate, and based in research and outcomes. The clinician may address issues through conversation, exploring problems, behavioral-based skill developments, expressive therapies, play therapy and other learning modalities. Many of our children and families benefit through Neurofeedback services, a state of the art technology that allows an individual to impact and improve brain regulation through training. Children and adults receiving services, remain in their own living environment, scheduling appointments with the clinician in a counseling office. We are fortunate to be able to continue our relationship with our TFC children and their families by providing Outpatient Services following Discharge from the TFC program.

Namaste’s programs and services are designed to meet the highly acute needs of children who have problems in social, behavioral and/or emofamily tional functioning. Additionally, Namaste provides support and intervention for the child’s biological or adoptive and any identified support figures. Children receiving services come primarily from homes throughout New Mexico. Children from across the United States and Mexico have benefitted through TFC services as well. Namaste provides services to a culturally diverse population of children and their families. The majority of children come from low income homes and many are in State or Tribal Custody.

At Namaste, we work with children who have endured tremendous abuse and neglect. As a result, they believe the world is inherently chaotic, painful and unsafe. In order to avoid pain, fear and dissatisfaction that seemingly goes with relationships, our children act in ways to push others away. Our actions challenge the child’s view of the world. In the attachment model, closeness and developing more intimate relationships with adult caregivers is the underlying foundation all interventions and treatment. We teach alternate behaviors that promote healthy interactions and provide an environment where children can experience nurture, support and fun on their journey from hurt to healing.

Age, cognitive growth and continued social experience advance the development and complexity of the internal working model.

Soon after coming into care the children are intensively assessed, in foster care, and then receive multi modal treatments. Foster carers are also formally assessed using a structured clinical interview which includes in particular the meaning of the child to the foster parent. Individualised interventions for each child are devised based on age, clinical presentation and information on the child/foster carer match. The assessment 'team' remains involved in delivering the intervention. Those running the programme maintain regular phone and visit contact and there are support groups for foster parents.

Barriers to attachment are considered to be as follows;

The disturbed nature of the child's relationship with its parent(s) before their removal by the state. Serious relationship disturbances are considered likely to be important contributors to difficulties in establishing new attachment relationships. Psychiatric and substance abuse histories and other criminal activities are common. Developmental delays in the children are common and there is a considerable range of regulatory, socioemotional and developmental problems. The child may perceive relationships as inconsistent and undependable. Further, despite harsh and inconsistent treatment many of the children remain attached to their parents, complicating the development of new attachment relationships.

Foster parents may also present barriers to forming healthy attachment relationships. Based on Bowlby, the caregiving system is seen as a biobehavioral system in adults that is complementary to the child's attachment system. Not all foster carers have this strong biological disposition as many fear becoming too 'attached' and suffering loss, many are effectively doing it to earn money and some perceive such children as 'damaged goods' and may remain emotionally distant and under involved.

Interventions include supporting foster parents to learn to help the child in regulating emotions, to learn to respond effectively to the child's distress and to understand the child's signals, especially 'miscues' as the signals of such children are often confusing as a consequence of their often frightening, inconsistent and confusing past relationships. Foster carers are taught to recognize what such children actually need rather than what they may appear to signal that they need. Such children often exhibit provocative and oppositional behaviors which may normally trigger feelings of rejection in caregivers. Withdrawn children may be overlooked and seemingly independent, indiscriminate children may be considered to be managing much better than they are.

RAD is characterized by markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate ways of relating socially in most contexts.

Such a failure could result from severe early experiences of neglect, abuse, abrupt separation from caregivers between the ages of six months and three years, frequent change of caregivers, or a lack of caregiver responsiveness to a child's communicative efforts.

Mainstream treatment and prevention programs that target RAD and other problematic early attachment behaviors are based on attachment theory and concentrate on increasing the responsiveness and sensitivity of the caregiver, or if that is not possible, placing the child with a different caregiver. Most such strategies are in the process of being evaluated. Mainstream practitioners and theorists have presented significant criticism of the diagnosis and treatment of alleged reactive attachment disorder or attachment disorder within the complementary and alternative medicine field commonly known as attachment therapy. Attachment therapy has an unconventional theoretical base and uses diagnostic criteria or symptom lists unrelated to criteria under ICD-10 or DSM-IV-TR, or to attachment behaviors. A range of treatment approaches are used in attachment therapy, some of which are physically coercive and considered to be antithetical to attachment theory.

Board of Directors

2011-2012 Namaste Inc. Board of Directors

Officers:

Patrick Tyrell, President
Tasha Teskey, Vice President
Ethan Simon, Secretary
James Romero, Treasurer

Directors:

Mary D’Ornellas
Jim Cooney
Leticia Delgado
Pasty Romero
Linda Pope
Roxroy Reed
Laura Kolb
Christopher Alexander

Privacy Policy

Introduction.

We take your right to privacy seriously and want you to feel comfortable using our web site. This Privacy Policy deals with personally identifiable information (referred to as "Data" below) that may be collected by us on our site. This Policy does not apply to other entities that we do not own or control or persons that are not our employees, agents or within our control. Please take time to read our Terms of Use.

Collection of Data.
Our registration process requires only a valid e-mail address and a unique user ID and password. Providing us with other information is at your option. Please take note that your user name, e-mail address, or other submissions that you make on this site may contain your real name or other personally identifiable information and, as a result, may appear on this site. Like many web sites, we may also automatically receive general information that is contained in our server log files such as your IP address and cookie information. Like most standard Web site servers we use log files. This includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement in the aggregate, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses, etc. are not linked to personally identifiable information. Information about how advertising may be served on this site (if at all) is set forth below.
Use of Data.
We may use Data to customize and improve your user experience on this site. We will make efforts so that your Data will not be provided to third parties unless (i) provided for otherwise in this Privacy Policy; (ii) we obtain your consent, such as when you choose to opt-in or opt-out to the sharing of Data; (iii) a service provided on our site requires the interaction with or is provided by a third party, by way of example an Application Service Provider; (iv) pursuant to legal process or law enforcement; (v) we find that your use of this site violates our this Policy, Terms of Service, other usage guidelines or as deemed reasonably necessary by us to protect our legal rights and/or property; (vi) or (vi) this site is purchased by a third party whereby that third party will be able to use the Data in the same manner as we can as set forth in this Policy. In the event you choose to use links that appear on our site to visit other web sites, you are advised to read the privacy policies that appear on those sites.
Cookies.
A cookie is a piece of data stored on the users computer tied to information about the user. Our site does not use cookies. However, some of our business partners use cookies on our site (for example, advertisers). However, we have no access to or control over these cookies, once we have given permission for them to set cookies for advertising.
Like many web sites, we set and use cookies to enhance your user experience, such as retaining your personal settings. Advertisements may appear on our web site and, if so, may set and access cookies on your computer and is subject to the privacy policy of those parties providing the advertisement. However, the companies serving the advertising do not have access to our cookies. These companies usually use non-personally identifiable or anonymous codes to obtain information about your visits to our site.
Advertisers
We may use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here .
Children.
We do not allow persons who are ages thirteen or younger to become members of this site. For more information, please contact our webmaster.
Editing or Deleting Your Account Information.
We provide you with the ability to edit the information in your user account information that you provided to us in registration by using your personal page configuration area. You may request deletion of your user account by contacting our webmaster. Content or other data that you may have provided to us and that is not contained within your user account, such as posts that may appear within our forums, may continue to remain on our site at our discretion even though your user account is deleted. Please see our Terms of Use for more information.

Changes to this Privacy Policy.
We may make changes to this Policy from time to time. We will notify you of substantial changes to this Policy either by posting a prominent announcement on our site and/or by sending a message to the e-mail address you have provided to us that is contained within your user settings.

No guarantees.
While this Privacy Policy states our standards for maintenance of Data and we will make efforts to meet them, we are not in a position to guarantee these standards. There may be factors beyond our control that may result in disclosure of data. As a consequence, we disclaim any warranties or representations relating to maintenance or nondisclosure of Data.

Contact Information.
If you have any questions about this Policy or our web site, please feel free to contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

This policy may be subject to change. Users of this website are encouraged to return to this page in order to remain fully informed about any changes in our privacy policy.

Terms of Use

Welcome to our website.
If you continue to browse and use this website, you are agreeing to comply with and be bound by the following terms and conditions of use, which together with our privacy policy govern Namaste, Inc's relationship with you in relation to this website.

The term “us” or “we” refers to the owner of the website. The term “you” refers to the user or viewer of our website.

The use of this website is subject to the following terms of use:

The content of the pages of this website is for your general information and use only. It is subject to change without notice.
Neither we nor any third parties provide any warranty or guarantee as to the accuracy, timeliness, performance, completeness or suitability of the information and materials found or offered on this website for any particular purpose. You acknowledge that such information and materials may contain inaccuracies or errors and we expressly exclude liability for any such inaccuracies or errors to the fullest extent permitted by law.
Your use of any information or materials on this website is entirely at your own risk, for which we shall not be liable. It shall be your own responsibility to ensure that any products, services or information available through this website meet your specific requirements.
This website contains material which is owned by or licensed to us. This material includes, but is not limited to, the design, layout, look, appearance and graphics. Reproduction is prohibited other than in accordance with the copyright notice, which forms part of these terms and conditions.
All trademarks reproduced in this website which are not the property of, or licensed to, the operator are acknowledged on the website.
Unauthorized use of this website may give rise to a claim for damages and/or be a criminal offence.
From time to time this website may also include links to other websites. These links are provided for your convenience to provide further information. They do not signify that we endorse the website(s). We have no responsibility for the content of the linked website(s).
Your use of this website and any dispute arising out of such use of the website is subject to the laws of the United States of America and the State of New Mexico.