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Mar. 17 — 18, 2018
Thursday 15 March, 9am-5pm: Working with dysfunctional avoidance and self-endangering behaviors in adolescents
Friday 16 March, 9am-5pm: Working with dysfunctional avoidance and self-endangering behaviors in adults
When trauma involves child maltreatment and disrupted attachment, the result may include not only posttraumatic stress, but also dysfunctional relational schema, emotional dysregulation, and overdeveloped avoidance responses. Based on John Briere’s upcoming book Trauma, Attachment, and Risky Behavior, this workshop examines the posttraumatic and attachment-related antecedents to substance abuse, dissociation, self-injurious behavior, impulsive suicide attempts, and risky sexual behavior. Although these behaviors are often framed in terms of borderline pathology, impulse dyscontrol, or addictions, Dr. Briere introduces the Dysfunctional Coping Model (DCM) and nonpathologizing interventions such as trigger management, urge surfing, tension-reduction delay, titrated processing, mindfulness, and RAINing. The first day of this workshop applies more to adolescents, and the second more to adults, but both days will be broadly relevant to the treatment of “acting out” and avoidant trauma survivors.
Learning objectives
John Briere, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, and Director of the Psychological Trauma Program at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. He is also Center Director of the USC Adolescent Trauma Training Center of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. A past president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, he is recipient of the Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Science of Trauma Psychology from the American Psychological Association. He is author or co-author of over 100 articles and chapters, 10 books, and eight trauma-related psychological tests. He teaches on trauma, therapy, and mindfulness practices internationally. For more information visit his website at johnbriere.com
John Briere: New Developments in the Treatment of Complex Trauma: Complex trauma refers to the effects of multiple traumas, often starting in childhood, over the lifespan. These often include disturbed relational schema, posttraumatic stress, and affect dysregulation. This keynote will describe three developments in the field that are especially helpful in treating complex trauma effects: titrated exposure, affect regulation training, and mindfulness skills development. It will also discuss the specific and essential role of the therapeutic relationship in working with early relational traumas.
Upon completion of this session, attendees will be able to:
Sophie Havighurst: Tuning in to Kids®: An emotion coaching parenting program: Tuning in to Kids® (TIK) is an Australian evidence-based parenting program that focuses on emotions and is designed to assist parents to establish better relationships with their children. TIK teaches parents how to be responsive when their children are experiencing emotions and use these opportunities to teach emotional awareness, understanding and regulation. The program also helps parents empathise with their children and regulate their own emotions when parenting whilst becoming aware of their automatic reactions to their children’s emotions and the influence of their own family of origin experiences on them as parents. The program was designed and evaluated as a 6-session group program for use with community samples and has been adapted and evaluated as an 8 and 10-session version for clinical/high need participants. The program has extensive evidence to support its efficacy and effectiveness in multiple randomised controlled trials. Variants of the program have also been developed for and evaluated with parents of adolescents (Tuning in to Teens), fathers (Dads TIK) parents of young children (Tuning in to Toddlers) and parents of children who have experienced difficulties such as complex trauma, chronic illness, and anxiety. A number of studies of the program are underway in the USA, England, Norway, Germany, New Zealand and Iran. The program has been widely disseminated in Australia and increasingly training is being offered overseas. For more information see www.tuningintokids.org.au This presentation will include an overview of the program, the research and the steps that have been taken to disseminate the program.
Associate Professor Sophie Havighurst is a child clinical psychologist at Mindful, Department of Psychiatry, University of Melbourne. She is currently the principal investigator on the Tuning in to Kids®research program and a program author. She also teaches child and adolescent mental health practitioners and works as a clinical psychologist in private practice.
Russ Harris: Happiness Myths - and How To Thrive In Spite of Them: Just suppose for a moment that almost everything you believed about finding happiness turned out to be inaccurate, misleading or false. And suppose that those very beliefs were making you miserable. What if your very efforts to find happiness were actually preventing you from achieving it? This state of affairs is what Russ Harris calls “The Happiness Trap”, in his best-selling book of the same title. Most if not all of our clients get stuck in this trap, at times. As do most therapists! So in this talk, Russ will highlight the most unhelpful “happiness myths” prevalent in our culture, and explore how we can help our clients to hold these ideas lightly.
Russ Harris, author of the international best-selling self-help book 'The Happiness Trap', is a world-renowned trainer of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT). Russ is also the co-director of PsyFlex: workplace health and wellbeing specialists. PsyFlex brings an ACT-based approach to the workplace, to build thriving organisations, resilient employees and supportive work environments. For more info: WWW.PsyFlex.com.au
Russ Harris: Getting Unstuck In ACT
Sophie Havighurst: The Tuning in to Kids® Parenting Program: Workshop
Kevin Ronan: Family-centred, Feedback-informed Therapy for Complex Problems: Theory, research, practice. Professor Kevin Ronan is Professorial Research Fellow in Clinical Psychology, School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences at CQUniversity Australia. Kevin as a clinical psychologist who specialises in problems of youth and families (e.g., conduct disorder; anxiety disorders; child maltreatment; effects of disasters including trauma), hazards and disasters, schizophrenia, and program outcome evaluation and implementation.
Wendy Kelly: Understanding children in foster care: The Relational Learning Framework. Wendy is a Clinical Practice Advisor at Victoria University and also works in private practice, providing therapy, consultation and supervision focusing on maltreatment and trauma. She has over 30 years of experience as a clinical psychologist, which includes 25 years of providing training to practitioners. She has worked in a sexual abuse counselling centre, Child, Youth and Family (now Oranga Tamariki) and a child and adolescent mental health service.
Other presentations
NZCCP is grateful for the sponsorship from Te Whare Mahana, the NZ Psychologists Board, and ACC.