description:

Many of the children who come into our lives through adoption or fostering are deeply traumatized and struggle to make connections with us because they are too hurt to feel. This cutting edge workshop, presented by Dr Margot Sunderland, will help parents and professionals forge the much needed emotional connections with our children.

This training day focuses on children and teenagers who have experienced trauma or neglect. By necessity they adopt defensive ways of behaving. But as Freud says, 'The person has made a bad bargain with himself', as these defences bring their own particular nightmare. Dissociation for example, is often referred to as a 'last ditch defence'. Fight or flight are no longer options. Driven by terror or rage, the child takes to internal flight and thus emotionally absents themselves from the situation, resulting in feelings of being unreal, depersonalisation, watching themselves from a distance, on 'autopilot', as if in a bubble or behind glass.