The 3B’s Therapeutic Model
(© Belong Therapeutic Support, 2013)
When I first started to learn about therapeutic fostering and adoption ideas in 2009 I quickly felt overwhelmed. There seemed so much to understand and so many different techniques available. Sometimes these made a lot of sense to me. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes I could see how the different ideas worked together and other times they seemed contradictory. Quite often I found that I was moving from one approach to another without any real understanding of what I was doing. All I knew at that time was that I wanted what was happening in my home to stop. I wanted the ‘happy family life’ that had led me to foster-adopt in the first place.
I was incredibly stressed, often in survival mode myself, losing hope and not able to take on very much. I became frustrated by theories and interventions that were too complex or simply didn’t work in practice for my children.
In the years that followed I became curious about what worked, what didn’t and what might be the reason for this. I also began to think about how to unite different therapeutic parenting ideas in ways that can be easily explained and understood. This led to the development of my 3B’s attachment focused therapeutic model which I researched as part of my Msc as an approach to integrate different therapies.
The 3B’s (Belong, Believe and Behave) is a relationship-focused approach. It considers the needs of both the child and the parent and seeks to provide holistic support that takes into consideration the factors involved for everyone.
Using theory and approaches backed by neuroscience and research I am able to support foster and adoptive families positively and effectively. The model is integrative. This means that I seek to incorporate a wide range of helpful theories, practices and parenting techniques into my approach, but in such a way that they all compliment one another and work as a whole.
The 3B’s model is woven into my service as a whole and is the foundation upon which I do what I do. Training on the 3B’s model and how it works in practice is available and a free 5 day free email course is available for those who chose to subscribe. It is also the basis of my first book for parents ‘I Can’t Do This – When Fostering and Adopting Feels Too Hard’.
