A Tactile Approach to Connect Mind and Body
Family First Adolescent Services believes that effectively treating our teen residents demands a unique approach and intensity compared to the typical model used for adults. Our treatment is tailored specifically to teens. We tap into our client’s creativity, vitality, and sense of community.
Teen-Specific Treatment
Teen-specific treatment includes intensive individual youth therapy that builds a baseline of trust and accountability with a teen’s primary therapist, group therapy that helps teens connect to and empathize with their peers, experiential therapy that allows clients to connect their feelings with their physical body while having fun, and continuing education to build self-esteem and ensure that a teen doesn’t have to compromise his future success.
By intersecting with teens on physical, academic, creative, and social levels, we are helping to ensure that the new perspectives, attitudes, and behaviors we teach our clients can be seamlessly woven into their lives and become sustainable tools in support of lifelong healing.
Trauma-Informed Care
Everything we do at Family First Adolescent Services is underpinned by the belief that teens can find long-term and sustainable healing from mental or behavioral health issues, substance use issues, and problematic gaming.
The bedrock of sustainable healing is trauma-informed care that effectively identifies and addresses problematic emotional dysregulation in teens. Introducing the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM®) to our therapeutic modalities has helped our clinicians make critical inroads with our clients. NARM® can help a teen understand his emotions and the appropriate context for emotional expression, set healthy emotional boundaries, and create healthy connections with the most important people in his life.
In our role as a leading treatment center for teens, trauma-informed care with NARM® at its heart is helping our clients find fulfillment in the present and build a better future.
Specialist Clinical Staff
We are able to offer a level of treatment that is second to none because of the way we cultivate our highly skilled staff. In addition to being passionate about and devoted to helping our adolescent population, our youth therapy staff is continually upgrading their skills—including becoming NARM®-certified—to provide the most cutting-edge and critically effective care available to teens.
Our team has rich and diverse backgrounds and are committed to our clients. We support that commitment by limiting each therapist’s caseload to no more than five clients at a time. We have also pioneered the 5-in-7 method, an intensive introduction to individual youth therapy, at Family First Adolescent Services. Within the first seven days of a client’s stay with us, he will see his primary therapist five times.
Healing the Whole Family
Our focus isn’t limited to teens—the entire family is our client. We believe that a young person’s best chance for long-term healing happens when his entire family undergoes a shift toward a deeper connection with themselves and others.
We provide specialized support, tools, counseling, referrals, and continuing care to address the essential role parents and guardians play in the creation of and maintenance of a healthy home environment for all family members.
We treat each family with compassion, curiosity, and presence. Our treatment plans are derived from a variety of clinically proven psychological perspectives, including Family Systems Theory, Attachment Theory, Somatic Psychology, Interpersonal Neurobiology, and more. Our goal for parents is to provide sustainable coping skills that can help them create a happier, healthier, and more stable home environment for the whole family.
Long-Term Continuing Care
When a client and his family come to us, we approach the whole family with tailored treatment modalities specific to their needs. We look far beyond their time with us and help families create a roadmap towards sustainable healing with ongoing continuing care support for up to a year or more after a teen completes residential treatment.
Our objective is to give teens and their parents meaningful coping skills. By internalizing healthy attitudes and behaviors, teens and their families have a greater chance of assimilating these new habits seamlessly into their lives. In the context of continuing care, treatment prepares clients and parents for a lifelong path of healing, wherein they are fully engaged in the modality that’s most going help them the most.
Get the Family First Alumni App
Alumni, parents, and boys can share updates, ask questions, support others, and stay connected through their recovery. The Family First App is a tool to help them receive support when they need it the most.
