The Five Ingredients of the Therapeutic Culture

All staff at the Mulberry Bush are supported to work together to translate the core principles into practice; assisted by high quality training.  The training program is grounded using psychodynamic theory, but making good use of attachment theory, systemic theory and ensuring staff are up to date with the developing importance that neuroscience has to play in our understanding of child development.

We use the five ingredients of a therapeutic culture model devised by Rex Haigh to structure our understanding of our work.  This model states:

’The five ingredients of a therapeutic culture and are seen as a developmental sequence: from the earliest experience of attachment to maternal and paternal aspects of containment, and the task to make contact with others in a way which allows intimate and mutative communication to happen.  Then on to the adolescent struggle of involvement and finding one’s mutual responsibilities amongst others, and finally to an adult empowered position of agency – finding the self which is the seat of action and from which true personal power and effectiveness must come’.

(Haigh, Rex: The Quintessence of the Therapeutic Environment)

These five ingredients provide a developmental model that helps in understanding the steps that we are working towards for each child placed at the school.