Dr Dan Hughes: Development Trauma - Blocked Trust and Blocked Care

About this webinar

Blocked Trust
Famous child psychologist and family therapist Dr Dan Hughes will address how to help children and young people with developmental trauma. These are children and young people who have been catastrophically let down, hurt and/or betrayed by the people who are supposed to care for them. As a result, some of them switch off from seeking close relationships and move into cold, cut-off states. Some re-victimise others as they themselves have been treated; whilst others retreat into a solitary world preferring to relate to technology rather than to people. Sadly, ‘blocked trust’ often leads to people disliking these children, being frightened of them, getting angry with them or giving up on them, just the responses they know so well. Dr Hughes will address how to relate to a child, what to say or how to be, in order to enable them to make that essential shift from blocked trust to trust and from avoidant or disorganised attachment to secure attachment.

Dan will offer theory, practice and moving case material to show how to reach out to children and young people who don't want to feel, to get close to anyone, and who often treat people who want to help, with contempt.

Blocked Care
Dr Dan Hughes will address how to support parents and carers who are experiencing blocked care. Sometimes a child or young person will be so unresponsive to, rejecting and/or attacking of their parent’s caregiving, that the parent no longer enjoys being with their child. As a result, their paternal or maternal brain systems shut down. They do not get those lovely rushes of opioids and oxytocin that other parents get, and they no longer seek out connection with their child. Blocked trust can also happen when a parent is triggered by their child and relives some traumatic power-based interaction from their past. Parents who experience blocked care are then much more likely to see their child’s behaviours as ‘bad’ or ‘selfish’ as well as seeing themselves as an awful parent. As a result, their parenting can become defensive and behaviour-focused as opposed to relationship-focused.

Dr Hughes will discuss how to help parents to be able to both think and feel about events leading up to their blocked care. He will explore the vital healing process by demonstrating using PACE (play, acceptance, curiosity and empathy) with the parent and then helping them to relate through PACE with their child.

What you'll learn from this webianr?

• Learn how to recognise when a child or teenager has adopted an extreme defence or destructive way of being in relationships and in the world as a way of coping with a deeply painful past
• Understand why children decide that it hurts too much to feel and why then contempt, control and violence are so appealing
• Learn how to emotionally regulate yourself in order to emotionally regulate the child in the face of the most provocative and hurtful interactions
• Learn how to forge transforming connections with children and teenagers who push you away, make you very angry with them, frightened of them or feel like giving up on them
• Learn how to use PACE with children and teenagers who are experiencing blocked trust, and with parents who are experiencing blocked care

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