Our Proprietary, Engaging, and Evidence-based Curriculum

We have a proprietary curriculum that was developed with the common challenges our children and teens face every day - depression, anxiety, compulsions, intrusive thoughts, suicidal ideation, drug and alcohol use, self-harm, emotional regulation, communication, relationships, and so much more. 

Our curriculum is designed to be motivating and engaging. Most behavioral health programs use a round robin format in their groups where the therapist only engages one patient at a time. It’s like a swim class where the instructor only allows one child in the water while all the rest sit on the edge of the pool and watch. This is boring and not overly effective. Bored children are disengaged and inattentive.

In contrast, our curriculum utilizes specific whole group facilitation techniques in addition to extensive pair and small group work. In our groups, every child is engaged the entire time. 

Another major difference with our curriculum and approach compared to the majority of programs out there is our focus on real-world skill-building. Most programs are didactic, they teach and talk about behavioral health problems and solutions. But is talking about swimming going to help our children swim? Of course not.

At Bricolage, we do far more than talk about problems and solutions with your child, we get in the water with them and actually teach them to swim. Your child will continue to face many challenges in their life after they complete our program. It’s our job to provide them with the tools and teach them the skills to be successful on their own outside of the four walls of therapy.

We do this through extensive practice in sessions. The beginning of the session may start by discussing intrusive thoughts that are consistently upsetting your child. Then we will present tools such as cognitive restructuring, positive mantras, and stress management in order to deal with their intrusive thoughts. We don’t stop after presenting this information though, like most programs do. Instead, we go on to then engage in extensive practice of these skills so that, the next time your child has an intrusive thought, they don’t merely know what to do, they can confidently and proficiently do it. 

Our goal isn’t just to teach your child to swim, as it were, but to make your child strong enough to swim in even through some of life’s biggest storms. 

Incorporated into the curriculum topics are dialectical behavioral therapy, cognitive processing therapy, rational-emotive behavioral therapy, and the seven challenges for substance use, all tried and true therapeutic approaches with strong underpinnings in the research on evidence-based care.

Here are the Core Topics & Skills your child will cover throughout our program.

Each child in our program receives a Workbook that goes along with our curriculum. Their workbook will stay with us until completion of the program and then they will be able to bring it home to keep as a valuable tool for them to reference and refer to.

Here are some sample pages.