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:
- 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.
