Foster Care Training

The quality of the early childhood environment is intractably important. Stressed early in life, a child will be triggered more easily, more over-reactive and reactive, more anxious and distressed, and less available to learn. Children and youth exposed to significant adverse events, especially such as may involved complex trauma, may be vulnerable to attachment challenges and derailed developmental trajectories that impact learning capacity and adaptive social conformity.

Although trauma has been recognized and grappled with in psychotherapeutic circles for nearly a century, the burgeoning field of neuroscience has brought increasing credibility to the relevance of our earliest years on our development and learning. Nevertheless, Peter Levine, one of the foremost pioneers in the field of trauma research and treatment acknowledges that trauma continues to be one of the most “misunderstood, avoided, ignored, denied, and untreated causes of human suffering today.” Trauma continues to baffle even seasoned professionals. Building a resource-based and strengths-based approach to trauma work can behoove ameliorating compassion-fatigue in professionals and resiliency in the youth in their charge.

This workshop, will involve a mix of theory and practice with an emphasis on somatic methods for increasing regulatory capacities and executive functioning in children. Participants will explore the impact of overwhelming experience (i.e. “trauma”) on development and learning, and are invited to involve themselves in reflective case discussion, structured observations, exercises, and/or multi-media presentation.