Online Conference: Trauma Informed  Approaches for Looked After Children

About the conference

This conference is designed to support parents and practitioners to have the best possible relationship with the children and young people in their care whilst supporting their own mental health in the process. Speakers will focus on the specifics of actual therapeutic parent- child interactions, what to say, how to be, in order to heal troubled bodies, minds and brains. Speakers include experts by lived experience who bring their own rich insights about the emotional needs of traumatised children in care.

Topics include:

· Key relational parenting skills and trauma reflective functioning

· Interactions that trigger the child’s social engagement system not their social defence system

· Vital psychoeducation for looked after children: the psychology and neuroscience of what’s happening in your mind, brain and body.

· Use of mental state talk and being fluent in many languages for emotional pain

· Blocked Care and Blocked Trust: connecting to a child locked in survival mode

· Thinking neurochemically in parent-child interactions

· Making the shift from stress-inducing to stress-reducing interactions.

· Healing attachment ruptures and relational repair

· Use of PACE (play, acceptance, curiosity and empathy) and other DDP interventions

· Developing the child’s capacity to mentalize, reflect, regulate and ‘name the pain’.

· Empathising with the negative transference.

· The emotional and relational needs of those locked in complex PTSD

· Supporting children to reflect on the violence they’ve known so they no longer need behave it.

· Key knowledge and skills for Child on Parent Violence

· Recognising when you’ve been trauma-triggered and what to do about it.

About the presenters

Lisa Cherry

Lisa was in foster care from age 13. Now Director of Trauma Informed Consultancy Services. Worked in Education, Children’s Services, Social work, Probation, Adult Services for over 30 years. Author of The Brightness of Stars: Stories from Care Experienced Adults to Inspire Change. Researcher, leading international trainer and consultant. Doctorate research: University of Oxford. "How do care experienced adults who were also excluded from school make sense of belonging?"

Dr Margot Sunderland

Director of Certificate in Therapeutic Skills for Foster carers (Trauma Informed Communities UK). Child and adult psychotherapist for over 30 years: extensive experience with looked after children in residential care. Over 20 published books on child mental health including The Science of Parenting

(first prize winner in British Medical Book awards) Director of Education and Training: Centre for Child Mental Health. Director of Innovation and Research: Trauma Informed Schools UK.

Dr Dan Hughes

Internationally acclaimed Clinical Psychologist. Founder of Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy. Originator of PACE used by practitioners/parents all over the world. Decades of ground-breaking profoundly moving therapeutic interventions with fostered and adopted children and their families. Prolific author including 'Building the Bonds of Attachment'; 'Healing Relational Trauma'; 'Attachment Focused Family Therapy'; 'Attachment Focused Parenting'; 'Brain Based Parenting’.

Jay Vaughan MBE

CEO of Family Futures CIC: Voluntary Adoption Agency and Independent Fostering Agency. Provides assessment/ treatment for traumatised children placed in foster families, adoptive families or kinship care. Provision includes Neuro-physiological Psychotherapy, Theraplay, DDP and Somatic Therapy. State Registered Dramatherapist, Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapist, Theraplay Practitioner, Supervisor and Trainer, Somatic Experience Practitioner. 30 years of therapeutic work with traumatised children and their families. Author of books/articles in the field

Aliyah Ali

Child in residential care, permanent exclusion from school, county lines, ended up on Holloway Pr*son age 18. Said it was the first time she felt safe. Now breath-taking work as Founding Director of Daddyless Daughters, a trauma informed organisation, supporting girls and young women impacted by childhood adversity. Passionate about preventing criminal and sexual exploitation.

Case studies of therapeutic parenting from foster parents

For refund policy see https://www.traumainformedschools.co.uk/returns-policy

Host or Publisher Trauma Informed Schools UK