Allynwood Academy
Hancock, NY

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Taking Attachment Into The Milieu
Allynwood Presentation At NATSAP

Allynwood Academy
invites you to attend a unique presentation
by Dr. Rita Argiros and Mr. Richard Reeve

"Taking Attachment into the Milieu"
at the
National NATSAP Conference

Lessons from infant studies of attachment are revolutionizing conventional dyadic therapeutic practices (client and therapist). We go one step farther in this presentation and explore attachment and attunement dynamics outside conventional therapeutic settings. Focusing on implicit principles of interaction, participants will learn to identify attunement needs that can foster secure attachments. Videos from animal assisted activities (dog training) demonstrate how attention to attachment and attunement can help clients improve and develop their relational capacity.

Dr. Argiros is Executive Program Director at Allynwood Academy, a position she has held under various titles since 1999. She is the founder of The Dog Corps, a program option at Allynwood now in its 5th year. Her interest in dialogic relations and systems theories of all types stems back to her graduate education in Sociology. Her experience managing milieu therapy is embedded in her training as a sociologist and her personal history. She is the eldest daughter of the founders of Allynwood Academy, one of the oldest therapeutic boarding schools in the country. Her conviction that dog training is a robust way to address many of her student's problems is one of the forces driving her most recent project: redesigning the program at The Family Foundation School. The first every high school degree built entirely around the study of Canine-human interaction will be opening in 2013 as part of Allynwood Academy, the new name for FFS. Allynwood will have multiple, specialized "schools" and programs each offering varying levels of academic and therapeutic support so that 21st century students with a range of needs and interests can begin to pursue their passions in high school.

Mr. Reeve is Head of School and an Individual Counselor at Allynwood Academy, where he has worked for seven years. He also runs groups at FFS incorporating the technique of embodied active imagination. A fifth year candidate at the C.G. Jung Institute of New York, his current psychoanalytic thesis research is focused on shame and early relational trauma as they pertain to the treatment of addiction.