UNDERSTANDING SURVIVOR BEHAVIOUR: The Neurobiology of Gender-Based Violence

One-day intensive workshop for helping professionals who work with survivors of gender-based violence and provide trauma informed care.
About this Event

Participants will explore how trauma changes the way survivors think, remember, perceive risk, respond to danger, form attachments, regulate emotions, and make decisions. We will examine:

• The neurobiology of coercive control and GBV.
• How attachment, trauma bonding, and intermittent reinforcement strengthen abusive relationships.
• The role of neurochemicals in survival, attachment, addiction, and return.
• Why hypervigilance, dissociation, compliance, people-pleasing, emotional numbing, and "losing time" are adaptive survival responses.
• How developmental trauma and early attachment experiences can increase vulnerability to coercive relationships.
• Why traumatic memory is often fragmented, sensory, and non-linear.
• How trauma alters perception of danger, risk assessment, decision-making, and protective behaviours.
• Why leaving an abusive relationship is often the beginning - not the end - of heightened risk.
• How trauma-informed responses improve engagement, disclosure, safety planning, investigations, and long-term outcomes.