Saturday 1st November 2008 (9.30am-5.00pm)
HELPING CHILDREN SPEAK ABOUT FEELINGS: WHAT TO SAY AND HOW TO BE
Cost: £145 (includes a complimentary buffet lunch)

The [child] is deeply affected when they realise that they are with someone who is surviving what they are communicating, when they did not believe anyone could survive it. (Casement, 1990:99)

This conference is about empowering child professionals to enable children and young people to address their painful feelings rather than carrying them around as debilitating emotional baggage, adversely affecting their ability to learn, form enriching relationships, use life well and thrive. Speakers will address the fact that children can’t effectively manage their painful feelings on their own. Their brain hasn’t established the necessary stress regulatory and frontal lobe functions. These functions can only develop if children are consistently attuned to by emotionally responsive adults.

Speakers will discuss how helping troubled children to speak about feelings can enable them to find their voice, to know what it feels like to be profoundly understood, and most importantly to choose to seek solace when distressed. Without such interventions children are often left relieving their emotional pain with substance abuse, self-harm, angry outbursts and other destructive mechanisms. Through moving case material, speakers will illustrate the sheer relief for a child when they realise that they are with someone who is helping them make sense of their emotional experiences when they themselves can’t do that.

Moreover, the speakers, all eminent child psychotherapists, will also explore how to become talkable to, and how to have a profound conversation with a child, in ways which can change their inner world from a cruel harsh place to a warmer kinder one. They will also focus on where feelings go when they are not fully felt, how they can be driven into hiding, projected out, transformed into bodily symptoms, or cut off from, often resulting in a lack of empathy for the distress of others.

Benefits from attending this conference

• Find new confidence and ways of being with children to enable them to talk about their feelings safely and effectively
• Hear moving case material to inspire you and fuel new ideas
• Learn how to initiate a meaningful conversation with a child
• Take away an understanding of how to help a child to move from defence to dialogue
• Understand how to find the words to make an empathic response and learn about appropriate vocabularies
• Learn how to find the words which touch a child’s soul

Speakers

Dr Dorothy Judd
Author: Give Sorrow Words: Working with a Dying Child. Child Psychotherapist. Pioneering work in the treatment of dying children and their families. Teaches at the Tavistock Clinic, London.

Dr Jeanne Magagna
Formerly Head of Psychotherapy Services, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and currently Consultant Psychotherapist at Ellernmede Centre for Eating Disorders. Consultant to the staff of Family Futures Consortium, an adoption and fostering treatment centre in London. Vice-president and joint coordinator of training for the Centro Studi Martha Harris Tavistock Model Child Psychotherapy Trainings in Florence, Venice, and Palermo, Italy

Sue Reid
Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, Child and Family Department, The Tavistock Clinic. Co-Founder Tavistock Autism Workshop. Co-editor: Autism and Personality. Editor: Developments in Infant Observation: The Tavistock Model. Author: Understanding Your 2 Year Old Child.

Dr Valerie Sinason
Director and Psychoanalyst at The Clinic for Dissociative Studies, London. Author: Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder and Memory in Dispute.

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