Parenting Children Who Have Experienced Trauma and Adversity
You want to help your child heal from a traumatic experience, but you’re not sure how. Responding to behavior is just a band-aid that doesn’t address the deeper, underlying issues. You know that there has to be a better way.
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You want to help your child heal from a traumatic experience, but you’re not sure how. Responding to behavior is just a band-aid that doesn’t address the deeper, underlying issues. You know that there has to be a better way.
You want to help your child heal from a traumatic experience, but you’re not sure how. Responding to behavior is just a band-aid that doesn’t address the deeper, underlying issues. You know that there has to be a better way.
In this course, you’ll learn about how trauma impacts brain development and how you can harness the power of narrative to help your child heal. You’ll learn how to create a healing trauma narrative to promote resilience and post-traumatic growth. You’ll learn how to implement Trauma Informed Parenting on a daily basis to help support your child in moving through their own healing process.
The Trauma Informed Parenting course is made up of eight modules, each consisting of three individual lessons. Course materials include a mix of videos, reading assignments, and worksheets. Don’t be intimidated – this is not graded and there is nothing to turn in. Once you purchase the course, you will have lifetime access to the course materials, including all future updates. You’ll also be invited to join our exclusive Trauma Informed Parenting Facebook group where you can ask questions and share information with other trauma informed parents.
Module 1: Getting Started
This module welcomes you to the course. You’ll learn about what to expect, take a look at the course syllabus, and join the private Trauma Informed Parenting Facebook group for support as you move through the modules. You’ll take a look at where you are now and set goals for your time in the course to make sure that you can apply the information to your own life in a meaningful way.
Module 2: Adverse Childhood Experiences
In this module, you’ll learn all about the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) study and how it applies to your own life, as a parent, and how it applies for your child. You’re learn about what the ACES study means and have the opportunity to journal and reflect on how this has had an influence on your own life.
Module 3: The Impact of Trauma on Brain Development
If you want to respond to your child and others in a truly trauma-informed way, you have to understand how adversity in childhood impacts the development of the brain. After completing this module, you will understand the basics of early brain development and some significant ways that trauma impacts brain development. You will practice linking your child’s behavior to trauma and uncover triggers for challenging behaviors.
Module 4: Resilience
Understanding all of the science and theory of adversity is super important, but let’s be real, it doesn’t do any good if you don’t know how to apply that science and theory to your own life. In this module, you will learn about neuroplasticity, how to help the brain change, and how to help your child build resilience by strengthening emotional regulation.
Module 5: Healing
Breathe a deep sigh of relief, module 5 is where the work of healing truly begins. In this module, you’ll learn how to harness the power of story to help your child heal. You’ll learn about implicit memory and figure out how those hidden memories locked away in your child’s amygdala continue to impact their behavior every day. Finally, you’ll start to sketch the skeleton outline of your child’s healing narrative by identifying emotional anchor points in their life.
Module 6: Creating a Trauma Narrative
In module 6, all of the works begins to come together as your child’s trauma narrative takes shape. This is the place where you write the story that will help you walk the sacred path of helping your child heal and move forward with intention. It’s hard work and your child is so incredibly lucky to have a parent who is so invented in facilitating the healing process.
Module 7: Trauma Informed Parenting
You’ve created your child’s healing narrative and now it’s time to talk about how to use the narrative and how to identify and respond to challenging behaviors through the lens of the Trauma Informed Parenting Guidelines.
Module 8: Wrapping Up
This is the time for me to remind you that you can’t give what you don’t have and that self-care is an act of service. You have to take care of yourself in order to be able to take care of anyone else. Expect a little gushing from me as I thank you for allowing me to be a part of your sacred journey. So much respect, my friend.
Ready to start helping your child heal? Congratulations. Working through this course takes courage and commitment. Once you have made the decision to enroll in the course, you and your child can begin to move forward together on an intentional journey of healing and growth.
The total value of the course materials is approximately $2500, but the changes you will be able to make after applying the course materials to your life will be truly priceless. Remember, once you purchase the course, you will have lifetime access to all materials, including updates.
What's inside
Learning objectives
- Understand the impact of trauma on children.
- Know how to link challenging behaviors with trauma related changes in the brain. u
- Understand how to respond sensitively and therapeutically.
- Know how to create a developmentally appropriate trauma narrative for pre-verbal trauma.
- Understand the prevalence and impact of adverse childhood experiences.
- Understand practical steps to build and nurture resilience in children.
- Understand the impact of trauma on children.
- Know how to link challenging behaviors with trauma related changes in the brain. u
- Understand how to respond sensitively and therapeutically.
- Know how to create a developmentally appropriate trauma narrative for pre-verbal trauma.
- Understand the prevalence and impact of adverse childhood experiences.
- Understand practical steps to build and nurture resilience in children.
Syllabus
Getting Started
Introduction
Guiding Principles of Trauma Informed Parenting
Building Reflective Capacity and Self-Assessment
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Syllabus
How to Create a Trauma Narrative - this information from the University of Washington is intended for therapists. However, I still think it’s worth a look as you work through this process of creating a narrative for your child. As with anything else, feel free to take what is useful and ignore the rest.
Tips for Creating Your Child’s Graphic Timeline:
Do try to capture everything you can think of that may have been highly emotionally charged, whether it was good or bad.
Do think of the graphic timeline as a brainstorming session. Use this worksheet as a place to do a brain dump of all of the significant events in your child’s life. There may be events or situations that don’t need to be included in the final trauma narrative – that’s ok! Just get it all out right here.
Don’t get too caught up on small details like exact dates or places. The goal of the graphic timeline is to create a rough outline for the major points of your child’s trauma narrative. In the majority of cases, you will not be including specific dates in the final story, so don’t get too hung up on including them here.
Don’t overthink this. It does not have to be perfect. It does have to give you a basic outline for what will become your child’s trauma narrative. If there are gaping holes, think about what may have been going on during that time for your child and fill in the best you can.
Tips for Using the Trauma Narrative:
DO: Let go of expectations. Before you introduce the narrative, you have no idea how your child will respond. You don’t know how they will tolerate the potential trauma reminders or what implicit memories will be triggered. There is no right way.
DO: Introduce the narrative to your child slowly if that seems right to you. You don’t have to sit down and read it start to finish.
DO: Be creative in how you use the trauma narrative. For example, perhaps it is beneficial to just look at one page of the narrative and focus on calming techniques – kind of like exposure therapy.
DO: Remember that the goal is for your child to be calm and connected to their body while using the trauma narrative. Proceed in a way that makes this possible.
DON’T: Limit your child’s access to the narrative. Allow them to hold, use, and explore at their own pace.
DO: Be sensitive to how the narrative affects both you and your child.
DO: Remember that this narrative is a tool for a lifetime. There is no rush. There is no hurry. Slow and steady.
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