My Nonprofit Reviews
Peggy Thatcher
Review for Attach, Burnsville, MN, USA
ATTACh is the trade organization of a subset of therapists, therapeutic parents and adoptive parents who adhere to "Attachment Therapy" (aka Holding Therapy, Compression Therapy, Rage Reduction, Holding-Nurturing Process, Rebirthing, Prolonged Parent-Child Embrace, Cuddle Therapy, etc.). Many, if not all of the members, adhere to beliefs about child development that are far out of mainstream. Attachment Therapy is denounced by APSAC and the APA (see the journal "Child Maltreatment," Feb. 2006). Although ATTACh formally denounces abusive methods such as coercive restraint and highly authoritarian parenting methods, many of their members, speakers and resources they recommend continue to promote extremely abusive and unvalidated practices. There is a website for survivors of Attachment Therapy: http://stopchildtorture.org/
More Feedback
I've personally experienced the results of this organization in...
Resourceful Recordings of ATTACh conferences. A number of quotes from these materials can be found at this website under "AT Proponents": http://www.childrenintherapy.org/index.html
If I had to make changes to this organization, I would...
Make it science-based and humane, but that would lose all the members.
What I've enjoyed the most about my experience with this nonprofit is...
nothing
The kinds of staff and volunteers that I met were...
Attachment Therapists.
If this organization had 10 million bucks, it could...
do a lot of harm.
Ways to make it better...
ATTACh was science-based and humane. The primary harm is to adopted and foster children.
In my opinion, the biggest challenges facing this organization are...
overcoming decades of bad press because of the high profile child abuse and death cases related to Attachment Therapy.
One thing I'd also say is that...
state licensing entities should not allow continuing education credit for the ATTACh conferences.
When was your last experience with this nonprofit?
2009
