Vive equips families with the experience and understanding they need to heal.

Vive Family Intensives provides transformational family therapy through short-term, intensive family experiences. Vive addresses the root cause of what keeps families stuck in dysfunctional patterns by surrounding the family with an exceptional amount of support that includes between 5-10 days of family therapy that include state-of-the-art clinical interventions, neurotherapies, canine-assisted therapy, and experiential exercises. Vive family intensive has not only demonstrated effectiveness in improving young people’s self-concept, anxiety, depression, and shame but has been characterized as providing the healing effects of six months of therapy in only one to two weeks.

At Vive our specialty is getting to the root of the pain caused by developmental trauma, which is often complicated by relinquishment, poor self-concept, maladaptive behaviors, and PTSD.

Our Services

Family Therapy Intensives

Vive offers 5 or 10 day, individualized, family therapy Intensives. The family therapy intensive provides clinical emersion and trauma integration including family therapy, assessment, neurofeedback, canine therapy, and treatment planning that optimizes healing.
Learn More

Each Vive Intensive is tailored specifically to the clinical needs of a particular family. The intensive experience includes the following according to the family’s needs and the recommendations of our clinical team:

  • Experienced, highly trained adoption/ trauma specialized Clinicians and Neurotechnicians
  • A battery of Evidenced Based Functional Assessments and Testing
  • Canine Therapy
  • Experiential Individual and Family Therapy (Couples, Family, and Individual)
  • Parent Training and Coaching
  • Neurobiology Training
  • Psychoeducation
  • Intensive Neurofeedback
  • Intensive Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback
  • Training in Calo’s Proprietary Developmental Trauma Model
  • Quantitative EEG Brain Mapping
  • Brainspotting Therapy
  • HeartMath Stress/Anxiety Reduction Techniques
  • Accommodations and Lunch provided

Vive uses evidence-based, holistic therapies in a much more intensive and targeted way to achieve accelerated results. Families dealing with issues related to early trauma such as depression, anxiety, difficult interpersonal relationships, and substance abuse can experience remarkable benefits starting in the first session.

What is Family Therapy? And why does Vive use it?

Vive selected family therapy as our primary modality because we firmly believe that parents need to be the safe and secure base for their child, not the therapist. Our mission is to create a “safe CASA” within the family, so that communication becomes the primary means to work through issues, versus holding each other in contempt, giving the silent treatment, slamming doors, etc. Family therapy focuses on creating a healthy family system, strengthening the parental dyad, improving appropriate communication, solidifying boundaries and limits, and helping to create emotional and physical safety within the context of the family, all while exploring the child’s developmental trauma that is impacting their life and their family.

The developmental framework that we use is called CASA, Commitment, Acceptance, Security, and Attunement.

We begin with Commitment on the caregivers part. For us, that is the parent, guardian, or primary attachment figure which commits to working as a family to further their better understanding of one another. That Commitment needs to be coupled with Acceptance. Acceptance by the parent and by us as caregivers can be a complicated process, but at its fundamental level, it is a recognition that developmental trauma and attachment insecurity is driving the student’s behavior. We have to accept that it is not a matter of trying harder for our students, but of experiencing how to trust others and ultimately themselves. Our students are inherently valuable. We need to see them as always doing their best.

Once our students feel accepted, they can begin to feel Secure, or Safe, both physically and emotionally. The caregiver needs to be a Secure relationship. Security is defined by predictability, consistency, reliability, regulation, and empathy along with established boundaries and clear limit setting.

The goal of our model is co-regulation, an emotional state in which our students can safely learn from adults and eventually from peers. Co-regulation is not a steady state. Our students will move along the cycle of commitment, acceptance, security, and attunement frequently as they encounter new experiences or re-experience some aspect of their previous traumatic history.

So, while attunement is the lever for co-regulation, the ground upon which the lever sits is commitment, acceptance, and safety. At any moment of dysregulation, as caregivers, we have to go back through our model to check that we are committed, accepting and providing safety before we can accurately attune.

We have made this seem more linear in theory than it is in practice. In action, this tends to be, as the graphic shows, a recursive process of progress and regression, rather than a straight line of progress.

What Families Say

  • “It was so nice to get real help from professionals that understand what our family struggles with on a daily basis. The therapists helped us better understand the effects of the developmental trauma our son suffered and gave us real tools to use with him. The work we did at the intensive was difficult, but extremely helpful. I can’t say enough good things about Vive Family Intensive.”
  • “I actually think it could have been more days. The time was emotionally tough but I feel like it could have been one additional day or even two to allow a deeper exploration. It wasn’t until the second day that I felt I had finally gotten the “hang” of what we were doing there.
    I have gone to various therapists over the years and in all cases, there is that 50 minute “hour” that demarks the start and end of processing emotions. Unlike that tidy clock, emotions don’t turn up just for the duration of that (abbreviated) hour. Though I’ve found that 50 minutes is better than *no* minutes, there has not been one single instance where I attended a therapy session (individual or group) where I ran out of ground to cover or items that need exploration BEFORE the session was over. It always feels like, just as progress has started up, the clock runs out. I’m out the door and in my car and merging into traffic and feeling like I won’t remember what I did/didn’t process. There’s a sad realization that it will be a week before I will be back in that safe space where I can try to pry up the lid on my innermost thoughts, process my feelings, and make progress. Vive was the first time -the VERY first time – that I didn’t run out of time before I ran out of things to process. This was an astounding realization for me. Having the full attention of a team of three multi-disciplined experienced therapists for half a day, every day, for almost a complete week was indescribably powerful. I had a chance to ponder, to explore tangents, to really listen to my family members- all without that feeling of a ticking clock behind me counting down. I cannot say enough good things about Embark. It provided my family with the time, space, and safety to *really* dig in to the thoughts, feelings and emotions that encompass all of us. Vive was a wonderful experience and provided an opportunity for insights into my family that I think is unique in the therapeutic realm. Thank you Calo/Vive for an amazing experience. 🙂
  • “I have gone to various therapists over the years and in all cases, there is that 50 minute “hour” that demarks the start and end of processing emotions. Unlike that tidy clock, emotions don’t turn up just for the duration of that (abbreviated) hour. Though I’ve found that 50 minutes is better than *no* minutes, there has not been one single instance where I attended a therapy session (individual or group) where I ran out of ground to cover or items that need exploration BEFORE the session was over. It always feels like, just as progress has started up, the clock runs out. I’m out the door and in my car and merging into traffic and feeling like I won’t remember what I did/didn’t process. There’s a sad realization that it will be a week before I will be back in that safe space where I can try to pry up the lid on my innermost thoughts, process my feelings, and make progress. Vive was the first time -the VERY first time – that I didn’t run out of time before I ran out of things to process. This was an astounding realization for me. Having the full attention of a team of two multi-disciplined experienced therapists for half a day, every day, was indescribably powerful. I had a chance to ponder, to explore tangents, to really listen to my family members- all without that feeling of a ticking clock behind me counting down. I cannot say enough good things about Embark. It provided my family with the time, space, and safety to *really* dig in to the thoughts, feelings and emotions that encompass all of us. Vive was a wonderful experience and provided an opportunity for insights into my family that I think is unique in the therapeutic realm. Thank you Vive for an amazing experience. “

Contact Us

About Vive

Vive has experience dealing with a variety of behavioral and emotional challenges. Using a Family Systems approach, Vive provides two clinicians, both with masters or doctorate degrees in the mental health field. Vive believes working with the individual client, the client’s family members, and the family system as a whole is essential to the healing process.
Learn more about Vive