Blocked Care and Self-Care: Supporting Carers to Stay Resilient in the Face of Challenge

Delivered by

Christina Enright

Biography

Format options

In Person | Online

Duration options

3 hrs | 4 hrs | 6 hrs (1 day)

Variations

This training can be adapted to a diverse range of contexts, and further bespoke elements can be added on request.

Content Summary: 

Our capacity to remain open, flexible, and compassionate in the face of the challenges of caring for traumatised children and adolescents is vital for supporting the child’s recovery and wellbeing.

This training workshop will support carers and professionals to develop an understanding of the complex relational dynamics which can develop in the process of caring for a troubled child and how these dynamics if not thought about carefully can have a negative effect on the relationship, with a potential result of blocked care or secondary trauma in the carer/professional.

Learning Outcomes

As a result of attending participants will learn about:

  • The concepts of compassion satisfaction, secondary traumatic stress and burnout
  • How our own internal critic can lead us to believe that we are failing/not good enough
  • What blocked care is and what causes it
  • How blocked care can happen in the parent-child/adolescent relationship or in our relationships with children and teenagers as professionals, and how it manifests
  • The complexity of human relationships and how unconscious dynamics can play out in the child-parent or parent-professional relationship when trauma is in the background
  • How to recognise signs of compassion fatigue and secondary trauma
  • How the risks of blocked care can be prevented and the importance of support and self-care for carers and professionals if it begins to develop
  • Important and effective strategies for self-care

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Training delivered by

Christina Enright

RN, BSc Psychology, Dip in Family Therapy, MA Child Psychotherapy, Dip Clinical Supervision.

Over the past 17 years, Christina has worked as a psychotherapist with children, adolescents, birth parents, foster carers and adoptive parents. This followed on from 20 years working as a nurse in the NHS. Her experience includes the development of a multidisciplinary clinical service for families experiencing trauma and attachment problems who were reluctant to engage with main-stream social care and mental health services. From 2015-2017 Christina provided trauma consultancy to the clinical team developing a children’s service within the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in the UK.

She also delivers training on child development, trauma and attachment both within the NHS and other education and social care systems across the UK and Ireland.  Her special interest is in early childhood development and the impact of trauma on a child’s developing capacities, functioning and behaviour. From her experience working with children who have endured developmental trauma characterised by neglect and abuse, she has found it necessary to use a comprehensive integrated approach in order to address the multiple complexities which such children present with.

Christina returned to live in Ireland in 2016 and currently works as a Developmental Trauma and Attachment specialist providing training, assessment and clinical interventions on behalf of Tusla Child and Family Agency and in independent practice with birth and adoptive families.