“It is not often you find a master orator, teacher, mentor and friend who is also a master therapist, consultant and expert in the healing of children and families. It is difficult to express the kind of positive impact received by our staff and foster parents after their time with Juli Alvarado. She is not only an expert presenter with a well-researched message on the effects of trauma on the developing brain, but her first hand experience with special needs children and youth as a foster and adoptive parent is more than the “icing on the cake,” but an integral part of the motivational quality of her trainings. Of all our trainings with different presenters over the last several years, Juli is the first to assist our foster parents in feeling safe enough to become vulnerable about their own personal change and need for emotional growth, rather than make the focus about the child’s behaviors. Her emphasis on the “family” and its role in relationship attachment issues is profound and meaningful, framed with paradigms that are embraceable and easy to remember.

Our Foster parents are gaining increased empathy for the traumatized child, staying more “emotionally regulated” in the home, avoiding being triggered by the “severe behaviors” demonstrated when children are operating out of a “fear based emotion” and recognizing that their most important work is to “stay in relationship” with the child and youth so that the “seeds of attachment” can be transferred into adoption, reunification or other permanency goals.

Needless to say, I would recommend her highly.  Her professional demeanor is exemplary, yet she has a poignant, personal aura that allows her to make connections with staff, administrators and foster parents alike.  For the first time since my 3 year tenure as SAFY State Director, I am deeply excited about our ability to train our staff and therapists in assisting foster parents as they seek to avoid the placement disruptions that have plagued our industry for decades.
One Team, One Mission!”

-Donna Bolinger MS, LMHC

State Director SAFY Indiana

“In addition to purchasing your Trauma Informed Care and Secondary Trauma consultation and training services for several years when with Heartland for Children as the Chief Operating Officer, I have recently entered into an agreement with Alvarado Consulting and Treatment Group in my current position as Assistant Executive Director with Devereux Florida.
As a speaker, Juli is truly captivating. Her truth resonates with many, which opens the doors for learning to begin. We all want to do this work better, and her presentation of research coupled with wisdom of old is done so in a way that creates an energy to heal and an understanding of where to begin.
As a consulting organization, Alvarado Consulting and Treatment Group asks the right questions whether the consultation be about an individual, family or organization that allows for the right issues to be addressed. They offer new truths about old problems based in years of experience, research, and a reflection of what has not worked time after time. Through these services Alvarado Consulting and Treatment Group helps you to keep a laser focus on the parallel process of trauma and healing.
Our current project involves the opening of new psychiatric residential treatment facility that will begin and remain a restraint free campus. I could think of no better partner than Alvarado Consulting and Treatment Group.
With regard to why I continue to choose Alvarado Consulting and Treatment Group, it is simple. They change lives, they change organizations, and they change communities. Toni Arcain says where there is breath there is hope. I have come to see this agency as the breath that creates hope.
As an administrator of an organization that provides a continuum of services from prevention to a children’s psychiatric hospital, the healing paradigm I have learned through Alvarado Consulting and Treatment Group is applied daily to my work with staff, parents and children, and has truly made me a more effective leader.”
-Eva Horner
Assistant Executive Director
Devereux Florida

“ERH brings together knowledge base and therapeutic wisdom that has the power to make a difference with individual clients, organizations and the systems that interact on behalf of children and youth who have been traumatized. It has been life-changing and has given us a framework that unites where there has been division. Juli’s message has meaning for all caregivers be they parents, foster-parents, educators, front-line staff and clinicians and administrators. It has strengthened the working relationship among children’s mental health, child protection, education, health and justice professionals.”
-Terri Sparling, CEO
Huron-Perth Centre for Children and Youth
Stratford, Ontario Canada

“Secondary trauma is a concept we all learn about, but few of us doing anything about.  Juli’s support for me and my work has helped me not only gain new clients and a successful business, but I am more in balance and complete, in and out of my office.”

-Gina, WI

“Two tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan and a brutal experience with my own VA office led me to Juli Alvarado. I found her book (The Quest for Peace) to be a source of comfort and support as I made my way back to the civilian world. But it was her coaching over a year that literally saved my life. Weekly, I discovered a place of safety and acceptance and developed the ability to move back into past relationships and to create some new ones. I knew the meds were not helping but needed some ways to calm my nerves and to reconnect to my kids. I cannot recommend her any more strongly than I am. The VA way of helping, did not help me. At first I didn’t have confidence in telephone calls, but after the first few I felt a shift and today, two years later, I still call when I need a pep talk.”

-Jorena, OR

“I want to tell you again that was definitely the best training that I’ve received in my career of dependency/delinquency. I think that every worker should have this from day one, as I sure wish I would’ve had it back when I started out.  I gained incredible insight both professionally and personally from the information you shared yesterday.  I whole heartedly believe that this is the key to reaching and helping our broken kids that we see every day.”

-Deanna McCall
Youth Champion
Partnership for Strong Families
Gainesville, Fl

“It is my pleasure to write a letter of support on behalf of Pueblo County Department of Social Services for Alvarado Consulting and Treatment Group. We have used them in a variety of ditferent ways, to include consultation around adoption issues, coaching, and support for our staff around secondary trauma issues. The work that was done with our staff around significant secondary trauma issues, especially given the emotional state that our workers were in, was nothing short of amazing.
The Alvarado Consulting and Treatment Group was known to us, and to me speciflcally, as an organization that did great work with professionals around very difficult issues relating to trauma I personally saw them work through issues with families who had adopted with great success when it appeared that the families were on the verge of splitting, so it was natural that it would think they could apply that type of sensitivity and professionalism to working with the caseworkers here in Pueblo after a very difficult tragedy happened that affected all of us. Juli responded very quickly and worked with us to get an initial idea of the work required and was very upfront about what this \Mork would entail. Within a few weeks, she came to Pueblo to connect with our statf and we couldn’t be more pleased. lssues that had been suppressed within many of the workers here surfaced and we were able to make a plan to deal with them. Without the intervention of Juli and her statf, I sincerely doubt that the issues present here would have been acknowledged, much less worked on. The empathy that she demonstrated and her ability to create safe space was without equal in my opinion, and after a very short time there was incredibly hard therapeutic work that was done. To our surprise, Juli made herself available privately to those that had participated via phone and said that she was available for support, which was crucial to our ability to decompress after very raw feelings were expressed.

Pueblo County could not be happier with the services provided and would highly recommend that any organization employ Alvarado Consulting and Treatment Group for secondary trauma needs, whether that be for clients or staff. I can’t stress enough how impressed we were with the professionalism and sensitivity that Juli demonstrated in her work with us. ”

-Lee Hodge

Child Welfare Program Administrator

Pueblo County Department of Social Services

“There is so much hope for our children who came to us with traumatic pasts where attachment was not possible due to issues beyond their control those formative years that neuroscience now confirms begins in the womb. I needed to delve into the subject of RAD a little deeper before reporting on this difficult entity that many of us “live” every day. As a parent of two “attachment challenged” children one, adopted from the foster care system and another, who, also came to a family from Russia at age 8 that gave up on her 6 months later due to behavioral issues – I want to say that our work with Juli Alvarado has incredibly healing for our family. The love-based approach known as Emotional Regulatory Parenting helped us expand our window of tolerance for behaviors and work together in relationship to each other as a family. We learned it was not a matter of “fixing the kid” – it was all of us that needed “work.” Juli’s integrity, insight, and intelligence along with the view and knowledge of the lens with which we see the traumatic world our children grew up in was life-changing. We no longer blamed our child for her manipulation or control – we knew the source of hers and that of our own which allowed our buttons to be pushed. Challenged to change the parenting paradigm we used and to acknowledge the fear-based world our children live in brought us to a level of peace in our home that we never could have thought existed in our first three years of parenting. It was Emotional Regulatory Parenting that made the difference!

Many of us have learned along that as we evolve we consider many paths along the way and, we take a little of here and there only to leave the rest behind. It is the end result that matters – Juli Alvarado’s ERP program is her own creation, an evolution of experiences that is love-based and a path to joy for many of us. Our youngest was on her way to “military boot camp” at age 12 when we began the work, she recently was 8^th grade student of the month in her middle school. And, our “little Russian” (also in 8^th grade) has maintained her placement with us for more than 16 months and is looking forward to adoption for the first time in her life.

Juli Alvarado put our family back on track and, we continue to look to her for the expertise and wisdom we have learned to now and expect from her. She cares about families and, she goes above and beyond the realm of our experience to help families like ours that she works with all over the United States. It is sad that our system did not take programs like hers into consideration when looking at the attachment challenged world the children who we love deeply live in every day as they grow towards adulthood. Their ability to maintain relationships is limited yes, but neuroscience has shown us the ability to re-wire goes way beyond what we imagined just a few years ago. Leaders such as Dr. Bruce Perry and others like Juli Alvarado are helping parents learn to see our love again – through the darkest Winter came an incredible Spring and I am grateful.”

-Ann Arvidson

Adoptive Parent/Professional in the Adoption world of Child Welfare