CPP Newsletter
Winter 2025
Welcome!
For other editions of the CPP Newsletter, click here.
Gratitude
We will be honoring the 30th anniversary of the Child Trauma Research Program with a three-day celebration on September 23, 24, & 25, 2026 (Save the Date)! This event will honor three decades of innovation, relationship-based clinical excellence, and the families at the heart of it all. In addition, the final day will be devoted to clinical training in attachment and trauma treatment. Please save the date, with additional details to follow.
As we approach this milestone, we extend our deep gratitude to all who have helped shape our impact over the past several decades. We are grateful to our dedicated partners, funders, UCSF colleagues, and the families who guide this work for their commitment to advancing healing for infants, young children, and families affected by trauma.
To join us in celebrating CTRP and preparing for the work ahead, click the button to make a gift.
Dear Community,
In our work, we help parents and children find safety again in their relationships and in the world around them. This sacred mission extends beyond the therapy room. Right now, many young children and their families are being targeted because of their identity. They are living under the shadow of fear and uncertainty; a painful echo of a long history of targeted harm. Many young children are receiving clear messages that their families are not welcome or safe in the communities in which they live. A mother holds her 4-year-old close as the child whispers her fears of being taken from her by “the people in uniforms.” If the past is prologue, the layers of the protective shield shattered by this message will be felt for generations to come.
CPP asks us to speak the unspeakable when there is a lack of safety or rupture in the child-parent relationship. Similarly, when families experience a lack of safety due to a profound fracture in the social contract, we are also called to speak the unspeakable. This practice includes advocating for equal access to justice and safety. We anchor ourselves in CPP values as we challenge and work to rebuild systems that have perpetuated injustice. Through this shared commitment, we foster not only repair in the child-parent bond but also hope in our collective humanity.
Oh, the Places We’ve Gone
Last June, CPP Trainers from across the country gathered for a summit hosted by the UCSF Child Trauma Research Program! The summit marked the launch of CPP Central—a body dedicated to the dissemination and development of CPP—and included a variety of learning content:
- Advanced didactics CPP fidelity and supervision
- Trainer-led workshops on “sticky tips” for teaching CPP
- A panel on policy strategy for disseminating and sustaining CPP
We are grateful for everyone who made the trip as well as those who joined virtually. Below are a few snapshots of the lovely gathering:
Honoring Our Angels
It is both timely and fitting to honor Irving Harris during this Thanksgiving season as we approach the 80th anniversary of his foundation because the field of infancy/early childhood mental health would not be the same without him. He is a prophet of early childhood whose moral clarity, far-reaching vision, and success in creating lasting institutions that improve society and children’s lives continue to define the field.
Irving had the rare gift of knowing how to think big and how to think small. He identified poverty as the insidious and pervasive common denominator underlying the most pressing problems of society and engaged in long-term partnerships with elected officials, public servants, community leaders, scholars, clinicians, and scientists for public policies that help children and families thrive. Simultaneously, he cared deeply about the wellbeing of individual children and their families. He spurred new knowledge in early intervention and created family-focused programs that worked closely with parents and caregivers to repair child maltreatment and prevent its transmission from one generation to the next.
Irving Harris
As a philanthropist, he believed in funding early and for the long term, becoming a secure base and an invaluable thought partner whose intellectual curiosity stimulated reaching beyond established canons. He was both pragmatic and idealistic, advocating for the social good on moral grounds and because he knew that children who are healthy, nurtured, and motivated to learn grow into adults who contribute to the social and economic wellbeing of the country. He summarized this outlook in the preface of his 1996 book, Children in Jeopardy: Can We Break the Cycle of Poverty?, which examines the convergence of poor education, poverty, violence and punishment and which 30 years later continues to provide a powerful articulation of unpalatable truths:
“If as infants and later as toddlers, we are treated as though we were without value, our self-image will be affected… If people think of themselves as no good, they are likely to be angry with everyone… Such people are alienated. As children they learn to hate their teachers and to hate school; they refuse to learn; and they tend to become friends with other children who feel the same way they do. Many days they skip school and hang out and drop out. Such a life trajectory hurts the individual first, then the community, the city, the state, and every citizen.”
Decades before the concept of social determinants of health became a widely recognized driver of health outcomes, Irving was acting to target the intersectionality of multilevel risk factors. He advocated for the crucial importance of early, sustained, and multifaceted interventions as the key to promoting public and individual health and wellbeing. He was determined to make a difference. In the preface to his book, he also wrote: “We already know how to create an environment that will lead to positive motivation in individual cases. We must expand the scale of our efforts to match the scale of our knowledge.”
Irving wrote that he considered himself lucky to have been born with an innate sense of curiosity and to have mirrored since early childhood his parents’ conviction that almost anything is possible if you try. He also spoke about feeling like an outsider because he experienced antisemitism in the academic and business circles where he studied and worked. He converted this experience into a stimulus for acting fearlessly on his convictions. He said that being an outsider gave him the courage to break barriers and to say and do what he believed in without fear of rejection. His philanthropy was bold and groundbreaking both in the United States and in Israel, where he had a significant and lasting role in establishing and sustaining the field of infant/early childhood mental health by supporting mutually synergistic initiatives in clinical training, clinical research, and direct service. His philanthropic interests were versatile but always centered on the core theme that healthy babies and families are the foundation of a healthy society—advancing reproductive health and justice, infant/early childhood mental health, family supports, trauma treatment, social justice, and public policy through programs that remain paragons of where we need to be. He modeled the transformational power of outsiders. We owe him a deep debt of admiration and gratitude.
Voices from the Field
For Anna, CPP has been transformative—not just for the families she serves but for her own growth as a therapist. Her colleagues describe her as someone who “speaks the unspeakable” in foster care systems while assiduously holding the cultural perspectives of her clients.
Anna’s introduction to CPP came in 2018, when she joined a Learning Collaborative at the encouragement of her supervisor. CPP immediately resonated with her: “I got permission to do the things that I felt were intuitive when working with young children and their caregivers” The training reinforced her instincts to lean into difficult conversations and address trauma directly while honoring the lived experiences of caregivers and children. However, CPP also challenged her in meaningful ways. “It took away a little bit of the distance we create with families who have experienced trauma,” she explains, describing CPP as a model that demands emotional presence and authenticity. CPP’s flexibility has allowed Anna to incorporate cultural practices and traditions in her work with families. She recalls working with a Native American family and integrating smudging, a ceremonial cleansing practice, into their CPP sessions (the family couldn’t perform smudging during supervised visits due to safety concerns).
“CPP provides enough structure but also the freedom to incorporate a family’s cultural practices”
Anna Clavin,
MA, LMFT, IECMH-E®, PMH-C
Hope & Insight
With a background in forensic psychology, Anna appreciates the intricacies of child welfare cases and the opportunity to integrate CPP into court-involved systems. Anna has built her career working with families navigating the complexities of trauma with Minnesota’s Child Protective Services (CPS) and partnering with local agencies to support families in the aftermath of traumatic events. In addition to her clinical practice, Anna provided CPP training at her agency. She sees training as not only teaching but also a way to help clinicians find grounding and purpose in their work with young children.
“Some of the most meaningful relationships I’ve built with families have been my CPP families.”
Anna’s ability to integrate CPP into challenging systems and her commitment to hold her clients’ cultural perspectives exemplify her commitment to resilience and healing. Her guidance through consultation and supervision has equipped clinicians to meet the emotional demands of the work, creating a lasting legacy in Minnesota’s CPP community. Looking ahead, Anna plans to grow her newly-formed private practice, deepen her engagement with CPS families, and maintain her connection to the CPP network in Minnesota.
Meet Katie & Tricia
We are excited to introduce two of our new CPP Learning Collaborative Trainers—Katie, based in Michigan, and Tricia, based in Nevada!
Katie Bresky
Department of Psychiatry
University of Michigan
Katie Bresky, LCSW, has advanced intensive training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy and more than 10 years’ experience working with infants and parents in the context of relational work, traumatic experiences and postpartum adjustment. She currently runs the Perinatal Dialectical Behavior Therapy Group as well as the Perinatal Adjustment Group. Katie is a therapist in the Women and Infants Mental Health Clinic as well as the Infants and Early Childhood Clinic and partners closely with families and young people to improve their overall sense of safety, health and connection to others. In addition to training via Learning Collaborative, Katie provides CPP training to social work and psychology trainees at the University of Michigan through the agency mentorship model (CAMP).
Tricia Woodliff
Woodliff Counseling and Consulting, and The College of New Jersey
Tricia Woodliff, PhD, LPC, ACS, IMH-E®, is a member of the American Counseling Association (ACA), Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES), Association for Counseling Adolescents and Young Children (ACAC), World Association for Infant Mental Health (WAIMH), and is a member of the Endorsement Leadership Cohort for the Nevada Association for Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health (NAIEMH). Dr Woodliff’s counseling focus is on early childhood trauma and resiliency building. She is a nationally approved clinical supervisor and a national board- certified counselor. She is licensed as a Licensed Professional Counselor in Oklahoma. She completed the Napa Parent-Infant Mental Health Fellowship where she presented a capstone on the creation of an Infant Mental Health certificate program. She was the Training and Technical Assistance Supervisor for the Division of Child and Family Services, System of Care grant, and she has provided therapeutic services for children and families for roughly 20 years.
The Road Ahead
In the previous issue of the CPP Newsletter, we celebrated the redesign of our public website. Since then, we have finalized and launched a new training portal for CPP! As we write this feature, our intrepid beta testers are in the portal, testing the features and identifying priorities for future development. In the coming months, new cohorts of CPP learners will register in the portal and use it to complete their training. Later on, the CPP Provider Roster will be integrated into the portal, and everyone in the CPP community will be invited to join! Stay tuned for updates.
