Training and events

The 4 day Understanding Trauma training looks at the current concepts of how trauma affects the body, the mind and the sense of identity, along with what is needed to for restoration of who we truly are. It's designed to work alongside any foundational training or understanding.

Through sharing this understanding we're able to aid healing and recovery to the traumatised and. We aim to help them unleash their potential and find their super-powers, allowing them to thrive as opposed to survive.

Understanding our needs as human beings, the ‘T’ word and what is trauma?

The body and the impact of trauma, regulation and developmental trauma – understanding the arrest that trauma has on development.

Impacts of trauma – Physical and emotional health and the systems. Indirect communication, unspeakable trauma. The three step approach - working with safety.

Recovery – What is needed, what can we do, traumatic growth and self-care. Exploring secondary trauma, trauma in systems, toxic stress and healthy living whilst working with traumatised families.

Saturday 8th October 2022                     Saturday 16th September 2023

Saturday 5th November 2022                 Saturday 14th October 2023

Saturday 10th December 2022                Saturday 17th November 2023

Saturday 14th January 2023                    Saturday 8th December 2023

Location Room4... Haverhill

Children and young people are rarely seen in a positive light in the press and regularly find themselves at the receiving end of the ‘monster’ epithet. But these kids are not soulless savages, they are survivors of adverse childhood experiences; their ‘monstrous’ behaviour is the means by which they manage early terrors and conceal the shamed and hurt aspect of their Self. They are children who learned that love only brings pain, and intimacy goes hand in hand with abuse. They are emotional orphans who grew up expecting the worst from others, and sadly many of us exceed their expectations.

In order for us, as adults, to help them achieve their full potential for growth and happiness, we need to dare to look into the abyss and venture into the lair of this ‘monster’, the inner den of the so-called ‘feral’ youth, befriend his raw energy and find the beauty within the beast.

So, on the day, we will embark on an exciting venture into an unknown world, a voyage into the uncharted inner landscape of the emotionally wounded child. Along the way, we will explore how to connect and communicate with hard-to-reach children and young people, and how youth culture, particularly the myth of the superhero, can give us an insight into their inner world.

But most importantly, we will discover that our greatest challenges do not hide beneath baseball caps or hooded tops but lurk deep within ourselves, and that the best place to deal with an aggressive kid is not in the classroom or in the dust of the playground, but in our own mind (Bernstein, 2001). For it is only by reclaiming all that is deep within us, and by extending our love to the estranged parts of ourselves that we’ll be able to fully open our hearts to those who have been wounded so deeply and so painfully.

A range of themes will be explored, including:

• How pop culture can help us access, navigate and negotiate the complex inner world of emotionally wounded children and adolescents.
• How to understand and work with non-verbal communication.
• Strategies to bypass the protective walls they have built around their shame and hurt.
• How to be vulnerable enough to invite a meaningful working alliance, and simultaneously, robust enough to survive intense feelings they trigger in all of us.
• How to give a voice to their unspoken hurt and help them re-author their painful life experiences into a new narrative that is no longer about shame and hurt, but about survival, hope, and triumph.

This event has now ended

David Taransaud is a UKCP registered psychotherapeutic counsellor, consultant, author, and trainer with over 20-years’ clinical experience working with young people.

He is the author of:

• ‘You Think I’m Evil: practical strategies for working with rebellious and aggressive adolescents’ (Worth Publishing - 2011)
• ‘I, Monster: positive ways of working with challenging adolescents through understanding the adolescent within us’ (Routledge – 2016)

Taransaud also works as a foreign consultant with ‘Alleviate Addiction Suffering’ in Karachi (Pakistan) and travelled to Kitgum (Uganda) where he set up an Art Therapy service in an orphanage for former child soldiers and young people affected by conflict and trauma. His travel journal, ‘Kitgum’s Orphans; Invisible Wounds’ was entered in the Social Impact Media Awards (SIMA 2013). An international documentary and educational impact media award honoring members in the independent film and global humanitarian industry.