This day of lectures and presentations aims to empower professionals with the latest research on the long-term effects of trauma on the child's developing brain. Dr Sunderland will address the effects of post-traumatic stress, what happens to the brain and how to heal the traumatised mind. She will explore the reasons for the traumatised child's disturbed behaviour, including the repetition of their own trauma by inflicting hurt on others. The seminar will explore how the body is one of the theatres where the memory of trauma is often re-enacted in all manner of stress related symptoms, sleep disorders, illness and hyperaroused states. From the emerging understanding about the neurobiology of trauma, she will explain how it is now clear that physical action is necessary to initiate new ways for the child to perceive reality, to calm some of the most primitive alarm systems in the brain. These therapeutic understandings are also relevant to adults suffering from past childhood trauma.

Up-to-date psychological theories and the latest brain research on the effects of abuse and neglect will be covered as well as the neuroscience of attachment and attachment disorders in light of the trauma of loss and separation.

Most importantly Dr Sunderland will present a variety of effective interventions and evidence based programmes that overcome traumatic repetition. She will consider implications for treatment, right down to the specifics of how to be, what to say, and how to become 'talkable to', so that children and young people can feel safe enough to want to share and work through their traumatic experiences.

Participants will learn:

• to recognise signs and symptoms of trauma in children
• a working knowledge for why a child can move from trauma to violence
• the science of post-traumatic stress in children and young people
• when persistent fighting or hurting points to post-traumatic stress
• interventions based on brain science which have prevented a traumatised child from hardening his heart and losing his humanity
• how to respond when children or young people cut off from their pain, dissociate or treat others as they have been treated
• key tools and techniques for dealing with a child's acute stress states
• the management of your own stress states and what is happening in your brain
• key tools and techniques for connecting with the child or young person who experiences the world as threatening and hostile
• the relational events that are key for a child or young person to move trauma to emotional well- being