PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA AND THE CHILD
4 Day Conference
FULL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
THURSDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2008
The London Voluntary Sector Resource Centre
Chairperson: TBA
Themes for the day: developmental neuroscience, attachment theory, continuum between childhood and adulthood, working with adult survivors of severe childhood trauma.
Chairperson: TBA
Themes for the day: developmental neuroscience, attachment theory, continuum between childhood and adulthood, working with adult survivors of severe childhood trauma.
09.30 Working with child and adult trauma victims and survivors: the patient's needs and the therapist's identification
Valerie Sinason
Valerie Sinason
On one level it feels disrespectful to consider secondary traumatisation to mental health workers when the primary traumatisation to the victim is so relentlessly severe. However, unless we look after ourselves and consider the impact of opening to the painful privilege of this work, we have nothing to offer. In looking at examples from learning disability, ritual abuse, refugee experience and dissociative identity disorder experienced by children, we will differentiate between trauma that is live and ongoing, and trauma that belongs to the past but is re-enacted internally. Attention is paid to counter transference, transference and projective identification and the familiar defences that fall into place when we feel overwhelmed.
11.00 Coffee
11.30 The neuroscience of childhood trauma and its continuum into adulthood
Margot Sunderland
Margot Sunderland
This presentation aims to empower professionals with the latest research on the long-term effects of trauma on the child's developing brain. Effects on anatomical structures and biochemical systems will be addressed. Dr Sunderland will then consider implications for theories of change and therapeutic technique, with particular reference to the healing power of expressive rather than transactional conversation. She will consider how art, literature and language can be used to deepen affective and cognitive processing.
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Change in the consulting room: how we join up childhood and adult experience in psychotherapy with people who suffered childhood trauma
Margaret Wilkinson
Margaret Wilkinson
Adult patients may arrive in the consulting-room with their 'old present' still very much alive in implicit memory, although inaccessible. Such experience profoundly affects the way they are able to live their lives today. This presentation uses insights from contemporary neuroscience and attachment theory to explore the effects of childhood trauma on the emotional, intellectual and imaginative life of the individual. Based on work with patients with very different experiences Margaret Wilkinson will illustrate how dissociative defences may be undone and change brought about.
15.00 Tea
15.30 Developmental Attachment: a continuum from safety and intersubjectivity to disorganization
Dan Hughes
Dan Hughes
The presentation describes the continuum of attachment from a protective factor to enhance optimal development to a risk factor for psychopathology. The safety that emerges from attachment security facilitates intersubjective experience between parent and child and is crucial for the organization of the self physically, neurologically, emotionally, cognitively, and socially. When the attachment is disorganized so too is the developing self: the child (or adult) is left with insufficient skills and intentions to rely on others and to learn from others, and his resilience in confronting future stress and trauma is greatly impaired.
17.00 End of day
18.00 Community Supper
FRIDAY 19 SEPTEMBER 2008
The London Voluntary Sector Resource Centre
Chair: Sir Richard Bowlby
Themes for the day: sibling loss and separation, the importance of sibling relationships, children in care, fostered and adopted children and parents' role in their recovery from trauma, social and political issues regarding children in care.
Chair: Sir Richard Bowlby
Themes for the day: sibling loss and separation, the importance of sibling relationships, children in care, fostered and adopted children and parents' role in their recovery from trauma, social and political issues regarding children in care.
10.00 "The Golly in the Cupboard" - reflections on being a mixed-race boy growing up in care
Phil Frampton
Phil Frampton
In this presentation Phil Frampton will explore experiences of sibling and peer attachments whilst growing up in care. He will assess the value of stability and continuity in relationships between children, and the potential trauma of their grief when separated. Care highlights the absence of genuine rights for siblings and children in general. We will consider: Are children's rights a taboo area for society?
10.45 Separating siblings in the care system: enabling the development of secure attachments or creating life long difficulties?
Julie Selwyn
Julie Selwyn
In England, there are 60,000 looked after children. Most of these children have siblings with them but many are separated and placed in different foster homes. This presentation will examine why siblings are split, the beliefs that drive social work decision making about which circumstances suggest that siblings should be separated and the longer term impacts of separation on placement stability and children's outcomes.
11.30 Coffee
12.00 Why are sibling relationships so important?
Prophecy Coles
Prophecy Coles
Through psychoanalytical clinical material and literature, Prophecy Coles will illustrate how sibling relationships can help to structure the development of self by fostering the capacity to be part of a group. In the sibling group sharing is learned, love and hate experienced and sexuality discovered. These experiences have a lasting influence upon adult relationships.
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Safe Relationships: The road to emotional recovery from trauma in fostered and adopted children
Dan Hughes
Dan Hughes
This presentation describes the crucial role of the foster carer and adoptive parent in facilitating their child's movement toward attachment security and the development of a coherent life story and integrated sense of self. The importance of the carer/parents own attachment histories will be explored as well as their need to adopt a nurturing and healing attitude that is characterized by playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy (PACE).
15.30 Tea
16.00 The Child within the Adult: therapeutic, social and political implications
Dr Felicity de Zulueta
Dr Felicity de Zulueta
Love/hate problems in relation to our parents are, for some, a major cause of disturbance. Dr Felicity de Zulueta will be outlining the importance of attachment research in explaining how she elicits the presence of the traumatically attached child in adult patients who have a history of childhood abuse and neglect. Her findings are indirectly corroborated by other therapists in the field of personality and dissociative disorders. These findings underscore the importance of attending to the importance of grief in the successful treatment of these disorders. She will also highlight the implications of her findings both in terms of child care in this country, where levels of domestic violence are very big, and their political implications.
17.00 End of day
18.00 Community Supper
SATURDAY 20 SEPTEMBER 2008
The London Voluntary Sector Resource Centre
Chair: Kate White
Themes for the day: the baby of the parent with a traumatic history, childhood sexuality, recovery from sexual trauma, ingenerational effects of childhood sexual abuse, awakening love in troubled children
Chair: Kate White
Themes for the day: the baby of the parent with a traumatic history, childhood sexuality, recovery from sexual trauma, ingenerational effects of childhood sexual abuse, awakening love in troubled children
09.30 Understanding traumatised babies and their parents
Dr Amanda Jones
Dr Amanda Jones
This presentation will bring attention to the baby's experience when cared for by a parent with a traumatic history. The birth of a baby can often reopen wounds for parents which render the baby at risk of becoming the recipient of distorted and pathological parental projections. Babies cannot help but develop defensive responses that are often similar to their parents prevalent defence mechanisms leading to the repetition of disturbance. The presentation will illustrate how psychodynamic parent-infant psychotherapy is one way of intervening with babies suffering such difficulties. We will consider possible consequences in later life when such disturbances are not resolved.
10.45 Sexual transference and countertransference in psychotherapeutic work with traumatised children and adolescents
Dr Anne Alvarez
Dr Anne Alvarez
The question of normal sexuality begins to arise in the treatment of severely sexually abused or sexually offending child or adolescent patients. It is an interesting and delicate moment during the process of recovery when less perverse, more normal sexuality appears mixed with, or even disguised by, the more habitual perverse fantasies. Writers in the adult field have drawn distinctions between perverse, eroticized, and normal erotic transferences. Some have also distinguished between counter-transferences in the analyst of an erotized versus a normal erotic nature. We will consider how these may arise in cases of childhood trauma.
11.30 Coffee
12.00 Intergenerational relational paradigms in working with childhood trauma
Dr Doris Brothers
Dr Doris Brothers
Research studies conducted by attachment theorists have found that the effects of trauma are often transmitted intergenerationally by means of the moment-to-moment relational exchanges, largely nonverbal, that occur between traumatized parents and their children. Traumatic attachments, according to Dr. Brothers, reflect the child's experience of the parent's dissociative response to trauma and the rigid and constricted patterns that shape their relationship. These patterns often re-emerge in treatment. A clinical example is offered involving the treatment of a woman whose mother had been incestuously abused in childhood.
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Awakening love and curiosity in deeply troubled children
Dan Hughes
Dan Hughes
This presentation focuses on therapeutic interventions that facilitate the child's readiness and ability to experience safety and trust in a context of therapeutic PACE. Within that setting the child is awakened to the presence of empathy and compassion, joy and affection for others. Within that setting too the child is given the support and openness necessary to begin to make sense of his life - to explore his narrative without shame or fear and to develop autobiographical competence.
15.00 Street Magic
From the book by Roanne Joseph with music and lyrics by Brett Kahr, a scene is rehearsed from the forthcoming show that tackles the life of a hardened inner city prostitute, her daughter and their journey towards redemption.
15.30 Tea
16.00 WORKSHOPS
- W1 Being with children
Dan Hughes
This workshop focuses on the therapeutic value of being with children with playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy. We will explore how verbal and nonverbal communication occurs without judgment, evaluations, or lectures and how the child's life story can be co-created to hold the child's affect, interest, and intentions within a state of heightened cooperation. - W2 "Can I go now?" Traversing minefields of provocation within adolescent therapy
Jon Blends
This workshop explores the nature, function and context of adolescent anger using case vignettes and contempory integrative Gestalt Therapy theory.
- W3 An Introduction to sensorimotor therapy techniques in work with children and adolescents
Gurjit Basi
Therapy has moved away from talking to getting back into our bodies and into experiences. When we are able to study how a feeling, image, belief, movement or sensation reshapes the experience we are freer to organise it differently. We will examine the process in relation to trauma.
- W4 The value of our own trauma in working with the childhood trauma of other adults
Doris Brothers
Trauma-generated relational patterns often come to shape the therapeutic encounter. Learning to address these patterns facilitates the working-through of disruptions.
- W5 Developing sensitivity to the childhood trauma of our adult patients: what enables recovery?
Margaret Wilkinson
Developing sensitivity to the childhood trauma of our adult patients: what enables recovery?
How does therapeutic change occur in the brain-mind? What insights does neuroscience offer to our understanding of this process? Clinical material will be central to our considerations in this workshop.
- W6 Close observation of parent-infant interaction in cases of pathological parental projection
Dr Amanda Jones
Close observation of parent-infant interaction in cases of pathological parental projection
In this workshop we will, through close observation of DVD footage of parent-infant interactions, make a detailed exploration the way that the infant evokes necessary defenses to cope with pathological parental projections and the parent's responses. We will discuss the nature of intergenerational transmission of disturbed parent-infant attachments and how this may be discerned in the interactions.
17.00 End of day
18.00 Community Supper
SUNDAY 21 SEPTEMBER 2008 - Video Linked Places only
The Tavistock Clinic, Seminar Room 1, Ground Floor
Chair: Sir Richard Bowlby
Themes for the day: childhood trauma and psychiatric illness, childhood trauma and eating disorders, new paradigms in working with traumatised adolescents and young adults, childhood trauma and the self, repetitions and fear of intimacy
| Lecture theatre places for this event are fully booked. However, you can book for a place within the venue to observe the presentations by video link. Refreshments and handouts are included with this ticket. NB If you proceed to book for DAY 4, Dr Bessel van der Kolk, you will receive a ticket to the video linked presentations only |
Chair: Sir Richard Bowlby
Themes for the day: childhood trauma and psychiatric illness, childhood trauma and eating disorders, new paradigms in working with traumatised adolescents and young adults, childhood trauma and the self, repetitions and fear of intimacy
10.00 Childhood trauma and psychiatric illness
Dr Bessel van der Kolk
Dr Bessel van der Kolk
This lecture will explore the effects of trauma on cognitive, psychological and interpersonal functioning and review the research on the profound effects of trauma on cognition, affect regulation, and on the development of self and interactions with others. We will discuss how trauma and disruptions in attachment bonds affect the development of people's identity and how this is expressed socially as difficulties in affect modulation, destructive behavior against self and others and in negotiating intimacy. This lecture will elucidate the range of adaptations to trauma early in the life cycle, including loss of affect regulation; chronic destructive relationships towards self and others; dissociation and amnesia; somatization; and chronic characterological problems, such as self-blame, guilt, shame, chronic distrust and identification with the aggressor. This lecture will teach how to assess patients with chronic PTSD and the development of appropriate phase-oriented treatment plans depending on the clinical symptomatology of the traumatized child or adult.
11.30 Coffee
12.00 Childhood trauma and eating disorders
Bessel van der Kolk
Bessel van der Kolk
While no clear-cut relationship between adult eating disorders and childhood trauma has been firmly established, patients with eating disorders have a much higher incidence of adverse early life experiences than people who do not. In this presentation, we will review the literature that indicates that eating disorders can serve as ways of regulating affect following early deprivation, and explore the clinical implications of these findings for the treatment of patients with eating disorders. At the end of this lecture, people will have learned about a variety of pathological self-soothing behaviors associated with childhood trauma and deprivation; be aware of triggers reminiscent of earlier emotional upsets that can give rise to abnormal eating patterns; be aware of a variety of clinical interventions linking childhood trauma and deprivation with abnormal eating patterns that may help patients gain greater control.
13.00 Lunch
14.00 The Effects of Trauma on the Self II
Bessel van der Kolk
Bessel van der Kolk
Psychological trauma affects the capacity to form trusting relationships and to find ways of making meaning out of a chaotic world. Early traumatizing relationships affect issues of self-esteem, and the capacity to identify and negotiate personal needs. Since alternative ways of relating to others are often simply not known, life may consist of a frequent repetition of re-traumatizing relationships. This workshop will explore the effects of childhood trauma on development of the self, and in relationships to others, and discuss how individual and group psychotherapies can be helpful in dealing with the interpersonal effects of traumatization. This lecture will teach how trauma affects the capacity to articulate personal needs. We will also explore group psychotherapy issues to deal with long term effects of distrust, revictimization and fear of intimacy.
15.00 Tea
15.30 The Effects of Trauma on the Self II
Bessel van der Kolk
Bessel van der Kolk
17.00 End of day
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