Content Summary Per Session:
Session One: Attachment and Trauma Overview
As a result of completing this training Foster Carers/Adoptive Parents can learn about:
- ‘The Window of Tolerance’ – how early protection, safety and care shapes the wiring up of a baby and child’s nervous system influencing the regulation of both physiological (body) and emotional arousal
- What is primary maternal/paternal preoccupation and why is it important?
- What the circle of security is and why it is important for a young child’s healthy development
- How Developmental Trauma creates fear and defensiveness in a child/adolescent’s nervous system and influences their behaviour
- How early Developmental Trauma through a lack of protection, safety and care, influence the cognitive, emotional, and social development of a child
- How Developmental Trauma influences the perception of a child, creating distortions in relation to themselves as well as the adults and the world around them
- In the event of Developmental Trauma, why there is a gap between a child’s chronological age and their social/emotional age
- Child-parent attachment and how it interacts with Trauma
- Different attachment strategies and how they develop
- How attachment strategies affect a child’s behaviour particularly around seeking protection and care
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Session Two: The Importance of Emotional Attunement to Build Connected Relationship
As a result of completing this training Foster Carers can learn about:
- The importance of responding to the child’s developmental age rather than chronological age
- What emotional attunement is and why is it important for traumatised children
- What is contingent responding and how does it relate to helping a child to feel accepted and understood?
- Why it may be challenging to building an emotional connection with a child who has experienced hurt and betrayal
- The importance of therapeutic parenting and being mind-minded in responding to and building trust with children who have been hurt, let down and even abused, particularly in relation to challenging behaviour
- Introduction to Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP) Principles
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Session Three: How to Care for Children with a Defective Signalling System and help them to Build Trust and Accept Care
As a result of completing this training Foster Carers can learn about:
- Understanding the child’s internal model of relationships and how this will likely differ from the Foster Carers and other typically developing children
- what is blocked trust/epistemic mistrust is and how it develops
- About miscuing and hiding- how children learn to hide needs or overly amplify needs as learned dysfunctional ways of signalling a need for care and attempts to survive and get needs met
- What are indicators of miscuing and hiding
- How toxic shame impacts on a child’s sense of self and behaviour
- How to respond to help a child who has learned to protect themselves through hiding and miscuing, to express their needs in healthier ways
- Rupture and repair and how it can help build a child’s resilience
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Session Four: All Behaviour is Communication – Supporting Children to Learn to Regulate their Bodies, Emotions and Behaviour
As a result of completing this training Foster Carers can learn about:
- How traditional behaviour management approaches for children who have experienced Developmental Trauma are inadequate, often ineffective and may even be harmful
- Setting and holding boundaries with calm and kindness with children who resist
- Different parenting styles in response to children’s emotions and behaviour
- Nervous system arousal – the window of tolerance – bringing children back into balance using Dan Hughes’s Parenting with PACE
- The impact of shame on a child’s capacity to learn from experience
- The importance of connection before correction to build and maintain trust and to help children to learn from correction
- Responses to challenging behaviour that enable a child to learn to self-reflect/mentalize rather than becoming or responding defensively
- Sensory regulation strategies to help children to be in an engaged, alert and calm state
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Session Five: Understanding Our Own Attachment History
As a result of completing this training Foster Carers can learn about:
- How thinking about and holding in mind our strengths and resources is imperative for our emotional and psychological resilience
- How our brain, minds and bodies influence our triggers of emotion and behaviour and subsequent responses to the child
- The importance of understanding our past relationships and attachment history and how they may influence our experience of caring for traumatised children – how our own attachment experiences may be triggered by the child’s
- The importance of having a coherent narrative of our own experiences of trauma and loss- building a genogram to reflection on own family of origin
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Session Six: Blocked Care and Self-Care
As a result of completing this training Foster Carers can learn about:
- How our strengths and vulnerabilities impact on us as parents
- How our thoughts and beliefs influence our feelings and behaviour and can make us feel like we are failing as parents/carers
- How the development of our parenting brain influences our responses to stress as well as tendency towards psychological safety or defensiveness
- What is blocked care and how does it affect our parenting capacity?
- How does secondary trauma relate to blocked care and how can we prevent it?
- Exploring and understanding our own stress patterns and sensory regulation in the face of everyday challenges
- Moving from defensive to open and engaged in relationships to help engender trust in a traumatised child
- The importance of self-care to maintain resilience/beginning our own self-care plans
- Energy medicine – self-calming strategies that can help
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