a conversation with:
Alicia F. Lieberman

Alicia Lieberman is the senior developer of Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP),   a relationship-based, trauma-informed treatment for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers who are experiencing mental health problems or are at risk for such disturbances. Usually, these disturbances are caused by exposure to traumatic events, environmental adversities, parental mental illness, maladaptive parenting practices, and/or discordant parent-child temperamental styles.

​

CPP starts with a four- to six-session assessment and engagement period. This introductory stage constitutes the foundational phase of treatment and includes individual sessions with the parent, with the goal of co-creating a treatment plan based on a shared understanding of the child's needs.

Within treatment, CPP makes use of a variety of intervention modalities such as: translating behavioral meanings, using play, physical contact, and language, modeling appropriate protective behavior, insight-oriented interpretation, addressing traumatic reminders, retrieving benevolent memories, and emotional support.

CPP is psychoanalytically oriented, but it integrates many perspectives such as attachment theory, developmental psychopathology, the field of adult-child trauma, and CBT.

​

In this event Aner Govrin and Sharon Ziv-Beiman will discuss with Alicia Lieberman the principles of CPP, trauma in early age, reaactment of the parent's trauma in his or her relation to the infant, kinds of trauma and their impact on mental health, different intervention modalities, the challenges of openly talking with children and parents about their traumatic events.