Dr Margot Sunderland Presents - Helping Children and Teenagers Talk About Their Lives Using the Arts and the Danger of Unstoried Emotions

Live Stream Event with Dr Margot Sunderland
(includes a presentation, two webinars by Dr Margot Sunderland and Q&As)

About the training

"Unbearable feelings become thinkable thoughts" (Dr Heather Geddes)

So many people don’t realise how past trauma is still influencing their lives today. They suffer from symptoms like phobias, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive rituals, insomnia etc and then spend a lot of energy trying to manage those symptoms. In addition, they may have intensely painful feelings, nameless dread, anxiety, ongoing sense of emptiness and/or physical issues (e.g. breathlessness, skin conditions, heart palpitations, stomach pains), for which the doctor can find no medical cause. It’s not a way to live. All this is the fallout from unstoried emotions. In other words, there is a missing narrative here; the story of an event or series of events that happened in the person’s life which, "rocked belief in a safe world”. (Alain de Botton, The School of Life )

On this day Dr Sunderland will present ways for emotionally-available adults to support children and young people in their journey from unstoried emotions to coherent narrative about what has happened to them. Dr Sunderland will demonstrate how use of art materials, drawing, sandplay, writing can be key to psychological formulaton, a process of ongoing collaborative sensemaking (Harper and Moss 2003). With moving case material Dr Sunderland will explore how, when feelings are organised and externalised in narrative form, new meanings about the event and new understandings of self and others emerge, which bring emotional regulation, resolution and relief. In short, ‘Unbearable feelings become thinkable thoughts’ (Heather Geddes) .

What you'll learn from attending?

• How to respond to children and teenagers who want to tell you about their painful life experience
• How to use the arts (art, sandplay, story etc) to enable children and teenagers to feel safe enough to talk to you
• Feel more skilled in what to say, how to attune and empathise in conversations that matter
• Help children and teenagers to reflect on their negative feelings rather than behave them and to communicate through words rather than destructive or negative acts
• Watch moving film showing how time with a reflective adult can bring about trauma recovery long term
• Learn ways of talking about feelings with children and teenagers so that can mentalise and reflect on their intense emotions instead of reacting to them
• Learn tools and techniques for use of sandplay for therapeutic storytelling

Dr Margot Sunderland

Director of Education and Training at The Centre for Child Mental Health, London. Honorary Visiting Fellow at London Metropolitan University, Associate member of The Royal College of Medicine and Child Psychotherapist with over 30 years’ experience of working with children and teenagers. Author of over 20 books in the field of child mental health. What Every Parent Needs to Know (Dorling Kindersley) won First Prize in the British Medical Association Medical Book awards 2007 (Popular Medicine section). Originator of ‘Helping Where it Hurts’, a therapy programme for troubled children in North London schools.

www.margotsunderland.org