At Lava Heights Academy, we strive for a multi-faceted, holistic, and integrated approach to your child’s treatment. This means that evaluations, decisions, and plans about your child’s treatment are made by a group of professionals from all aspects of the program, along with the student and their parent/guardians.
Our Treatment Team is comprised of the following members: The executive director, department directors, therapists, nurses, psychiatrist, care coordinator, and the parent/guardian.
At Lava Heights, one of our main goals is to help teens heal from past traumas, learn healthy coping skills, and build healthy relationships.
Our Treatment Objectives
- Rebuild healthy child-parent relationships
- Heal wounds of discord and oppositional defiance
- Root out the causes of substance abuse addiction
- Mend the negative effects of trauma
- Repair the challenging influence of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse
- Dissect the complications of building one’s identity and diminishing poor self-image
- Build insight into the dynamics of attachment to establish healthy relationships
- Rectify the damages of Depression and self-harm
- Improve poor decision-making skills
Therapy
Our residential treatment center is staffed with an excellent team of licensed therapists and mental health professionals. Practices such as DBT and CBT are mixed with Art, Drama, Dance/Movement, and Music programs for the most comprehensive and integrated treatment available. Not only does an art piece show expression, but it accesses the deepest emotional reaction to the targeted problem when coupled with evidenced-based therapies. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has spent years talking about how our bodies store the effects of trauma and how physical movement and drama with effective therapy techniques can root out the negative effects of trauma. PTSD is not often cured in the confines of an office through typical talk therapies. We have theatre settings, a dance studio, art rooms, and musical instruments in which the student can be engaged with these techniques. Our medical team, comprised of a nurse practitioner, psychiatrist, and nurse, provide years of experience to assure that the medical needs of students are taken care of. In residential treatment, we can stabilize your child on the best medication possible, working together as a team.
Assimilated into the therapy program are:
- Clinical assessments and testing with progress monitoring
- Relationship-based treatment
- Starting where the client is and molding the treatment to that person’s needs
- Building upon the values of the client to aid in healthy decision making
- Weekly individual therapy sessions
- Individual art sessions
- Weekly family therapy session, via telephone or webcam
- Experiential opportunities, such as hikes, outdoor activities, and visits to our country’s premier National Parks and Monuments
- Community Service Projects
- 24/7 on-duty Nurse with full medical care available
- Parent/student full-day workshops are offered three times annually, including creative art sessions, family therapy, and growth enriched parent-child activities.
- Group therapy and daily specialty groups including trauma, emotional regulation and distress tolerance, addiction recovery, attachment, guided group intervention, self-worth, boundary issues, and adolescent identity.