We are the country’s leading experts at working with adoptive families and addressing the dysfunctional patterns that prevent healthy relationship. We have healed and restored the trust of hundreds of families.

Most adopted teenagers we work with have had exposure to early childhood stress and even trauma. The unhealthy and negative behaviors, and DSM diagnoses, they have developed are a means to cope with this underlying anxiety.

We employ Golden Retrievers to supplement our talented therapists and to help heal this underlying stress. Our students raise, train, feed, and sometimes adopt these canines in a process we call “transferable attachment”. Through this process our students learn how to create and maintain reciprocal relationships. They learn empathy. They learn to give. They heal trauma. We also heal trauma by harnessing the power of successful experiences using the stunning resources of Lake of the Ozarks.We teach fly fishing, wake boarding, water skiing, canoeing, rock climbing, and even distance biking.

What we are really doing is engineering successes that improve self-esteem, trust, communication, and relationship. After experiencing repetitive, relevant, relational, rewarding successes, our students begin to become comfortable succeeding. They stop looking for the world to punish or hurt them. They start expecting the world to be rewarding. They relate to caregivers and parents in trusting ways. They begin to experience joy. They become safe.

Calo Teens espouses a true relational approach to create change from the inside out, heart first and behavior second. At Calo Teens, we treat a very specific subset of the struggling teen population: we heal the effects of adverse childhood experiences using a relational paradigm along with some of the most innovative and effective clinical treatment available anywhere. Adopted teens and emotionally unstable teens with a history of stress and even trauma (abuse and neglect) in the early years (even in utero) are our focus. Our teens are damaged in the areas of empathy, altruism, and relationship formation. Healing this damage requires that lasting change be created within the context of safe relationships not by virtue of consequences and rewards.

Calo Teens is the nation’s first adoption specific family treatment center.

What is Calo?

Overview