What is the ARC Framework?
The Attachment, Regulation, and Competency (ARC) Framework serves as a versatile, component-based intervention crafted for children and adolescents grappling with complex trauma alongside their caregiving systems. Anchored in four pivotal domains—normative childhood development, traumatic stress, attachment, and risk and resilience—the ARC framework delves into the foundational aspects crucial for understanding and addressing the impact of trauma on young individuals.
By synthesizing insights from normative childhood development, traumatic stress, attachment, and risk and resilience, ARC delineates essential childhood skills and competencies often compromised by traumatic stress and attachment disruptions. Addressing these factors becomes pivotal in predicting resilient outcomes for individuals. The ARC framework, designed as an individual-level clinical intervention for use in treatment settings with youth and families and as an organizational framework, is strategically employed within service systems to foster trauma-informed care.
Practitioners adhering to the ARC framework can effectively apply its principles across the developmental spectrum, from birth through young adulthood. This flexibility allows for the utilization of guidelines with youth exhibiting diverse developmental and cognitive functioning levels and a wide array of symptom presentations. Notably, Canine Behavior Mediators and Counselors can extend the application of the ARC framework to support the treatment goals for chronic or problematic canine dysregulation and trauma among dog guardians and caregivers.
In the realm of animal behaviour, ARC for Dogs broadens the horizons of the ARC Framework, adapting its critical components for children and youth to address the unique needs of canines and their family systems. This specialized approach seeks to unravel the impact of early aversive or traumatic experiences and attachment disruptions on the development of resilience in dogs. By understanding these dynamics, ARC for Dogs aims to shed light on the root causes of chronic canine dysregulation and its associated symptoms.
The ARC for Dogs Domains and Targets
The ARC for Dogs Framework is organized around three primary domains of intervention and identifies eight key treatment targets as described below.
Attachment. The framework focuses on strengthening the caregiving system for dogs through enhancing support, skills, and relational resources for adult guardians & caregivers.
In many families and systems, guardians and their dogs have endured exposure to multiple stressors and traumatic experiences. Even in family systems that have experienced little or no prior adversity, the effect of a dog's relational trauma is likely to impact ongoing attachment relationships with guardians.
Guardian support and the guardian-dog relationship require an emphasis on three primary targets:
(1) Guardian Affect Management: Supporting guardians in recognizing, understanding, accepting, and managing their own emotional and physiological responses, particularly as they relate to and impact caregiving;
(2) Attunement: Enhancing rhythm and reciprocity in the guardian-dog relationship and helping caregivers deepen their understanding of dog behaviour and respond to the unmet needs that are driving behaviour and
(3) Consistent Response: Building effective, trauma-informed responses to dog behaviour that increase, rather than decrease, safety.
(4) Routines and Rituals:
Regulation. Many dogs who experience trauma are referred for treatment services or struggle in settings like parks or clinics as a result of complex behaviours, out-of-control emotions, and impulsive or disorganized bodies. Underlying these challenges is often difficulty with the regulation – of feelings, thoughts, and physical experience. Treatment emphasizes cultivating self-awareness and skill in identifying, understanding, tolerating, and managing internal experiences.
ARC for Dogs addresses regulation through:
(1) Canine Affect Identification: Supporting dogs and caregivers in developing an awareness of triggers, arousal states, and associated thoughts/associations, physical signs of stress and behaviours;
(2) Canine Affect Modulation: Helping dogs develop an increased capacity to tolerate and manage physiological and emotional experiences and
(3) Canine Affect Expression: Enhancing skills in emotional expression, de-escalation and disengagement.
Competency. The ARC for Dogs framework addresses critical factors associated with resilience in stress-impacted family systems. A goal of intervention utilizing ARC for Dogs is to go beyond symptom reduction and increase positive/resilient outcomes among families and dogs receiving the intervention.
Competency goals include:
(1) Improving Executive Functions: Increasing opportunity for choice and empowerment, and skill in recognizing choice points and in effective decision-making and problem-solving; and
(2) Building Skills & Strategies: Identifying and exploring various aspects of behaviour skills and building cooperative relationships with guardians and caregivers. This development area is often referred to as dog training and is meant to facilitate the acquisition of life skills, increase cooperation and improve responsivity and attention.
Integral to the fabric of the ARC for Dogs approach is a deliberate focus on three key pillars: engagement (the significance of this objective), psychoeducation (the rationale behind our actions), and routine (establishing expectations). The ARC for Dogs approach aims to facilitate dogs and their guardians to achieve adept engagement with the world, fostering empowerment and thriving instead of being fixated on stress and mere survival. The litmus test for successful integration is when this shift from a survival-oriented mindset to one of empowerment and thriving is realized.
If your dog is experiencing canine dysregulation, the ARC for Dogs Framework is suitable for supporting healing, growth and resilience.
Family Dog Mediation and Counselling sessions are an excellent way to discover the underlying nervous system dysfunction linked to your dog's emotional and behavioural expression and learn how to help them regain a healthy baseline for a thriving life.