Developmental Trauma: What Every Child Professional Needs to Know

Essential viewing for anyone working or living with children/young people who have experienced maltreatment.

(Please note this webinar includes some film footage that some viewers may find particularly distressing.)

Dr Margot Sunderland defines what is meant by developmental trauma. She explores how it impacts on the brain leaving a whole raft of blocks to quality of life, e.g. compromised reward processing system, memory processing system and over-active threat response system in the brain, poor emotional regulation, blocked trust, seeing relationships as primarily being about power and control, low self-esteem and dissociation and re-victimisation as a defence against unbearable pain.

Dr Sunderland then discusses key relational interventions vital for recovery and also to support the process of repair in the brain (known as neuroplasticity and neurogenesis). She addresses how emotionally available adults need to be with these vulnerable children and specifically how to gain their trust and how to respond to times of intense emotion and to behaviours that challenge. She argues that it's vital for foster carers, adoptive parents and schools to be made aware of the very particular unmet emotional needs in these children and discusses how to meet those needs.