Therapy Modalities

The programing at the Milwaukee Academy is designed to help female adolescents replace unsafe and irrational thoughts with rational and healthy thinking. The intensive, comprehensive program provides individual therapy, family counseling, drug and alcohol education, moral development, anger management, self-esteem development, as well as a focus on ethics and values, relationship issues, women's health issues and recovery from/prevention of sexual exploitation.

Through close supervision and structure, the program helps your child begin to understand and learn the skills necessary to successfully manage themselves in their home community.  The focus on treatment is the empowerment of the adolescent to be able to manage difficult mental health and trauma symptoms and choose a safer method of expressing her needs and feelings. Once she is able to recognize that she can choose a positive way of interacting with others, despite some things being beyond her control, she is then able to recognize the possibility of changing her current destructive ways of coping.

An individual treatment plan is developed with short and long term goals and objectives that are accomplished through a team approach. As appropriate, focus is added to the treatment plan to include alcohol and other drug abuse (AODA), and/or recovery from sexual exploitation. The extent of focus for all of the treatment plan areas is determined by the placing agency's identification of outcomes desired. The individual needs of the resident will determine the extent of services.

The Clinical team has a passion for innovative and effective evidence based treatment modalities which include:

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Trauma Focused CBT (TF-CBT)
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)- if deemed appropriate by the treatment team
• Motivational Interviewing
• Aggression Replacement Training (ART)
• Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS)
• Life Space Crisis Intervention