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Developmental Trauma & Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs):
Repairing the Damage™
Repairing the Damage™ is a 3-day course from the Association for Psychological Therapies (APT), a leading provider of Developmental Trauma & Adverse Childhood Experiences training courses in the UK and Ireland, for professionals working with young people.
It is the only Developmental Trauma & Adverse Childhood Experiences training that is APT-accredited and also gives you access to APT’s relevant downloadable resources for use post-course. The course is available for teams and individuals and can be attended face-to-face or online. It can also be completed as part of The APT Diploma for working in Child & Adolescent Mental Health.
Executive Summary:
Adverse childhood experiences may result in changes in the deepest parts of the brain, resulting in effects which are behavioral, cognitive, biological, social and emotional. Examples include: aggressive behaviour, withdrawal, poor self esteem, hostility to others, lack of interest in activities, disturbed sleep and appetite, sadness, anxiety or anger problems, and poor relationships. Although this is a disturbing list there are many children who exhibit most or all of these as a complete 'package' of problems, resistant to repeated intervention and so the cause of great frustration to professionals. The aim of this course is to repair the damage and so avoid those consequences.
Who should attend?
The course is intended mainly for professionals working with young people, though not necessarily in ‘formal’ 45-minute 1:1 sessions, so including residential settings, foster care, health visitors, school nurses, and secure residential settings, and many more.
You are welcome to attend the course if you work in a one-to-one clinical setting, CAMHS for example, but you may have to work harder to see how you can apply the same principles.
The same applies if you work with adults (ACEs affect people across the lifespan after all), you are just as welcome and you also may have to do some extra work to apply the principles.
The Course Covers:
- Recognising the damage. It is important to be able to recognise children who have had experiences which are damaging enough to cause significant long term damage. (In fact relatively little time is spent on this because most delegates will be from facilities where this applies to most of the children.)
- Why 'damage', although an unappealing term, is an apt one because of the effects on neural structures in the brain. Why it is helpful to know about this for intervening successfully.
- What events cause this damage? Traumatic events can certainly cause permanent damage but, equally, so can the absence of positive events. In between there is the drip feed of events which are less than traumatic but add up to a similar effect. Why we need to know this, so we can institute 'neutralisng events'.
- Counter-traumas. If a trauma is a complex network of interlinking neurones that can be easily or spontaneously triggered, with disturbing effects, then a counter-trauma is the same thing but with pleasurable effects. An event so good that it effects the person for ever.
- Re-treading the neuronal path. Why it is so important to reflect on counter-traumas with the young person, to laugh about them and be pleased about them. How to do it.
- Making sense of bad experiences, especially where 'logical, evidence-based reasoning' turns bad. Where is the logical fallacy in the following: "My parents got rid of me. Everybody knows that parents always love their children. So I must be really abnormal, unlovable, and disgusting"?
- Talking about sex. We all know that an intimate relationship with the right partner reaches parts of the brain that talking therapies will always struggle to do. And yet adolescents having sex can be 'administratively inconvenient', worrying, and disturbing for us. So how do we square that circle and tackle this most important of taboos constructively?
- How to work on 'maladaptive schemas' in an everyday, non-clinical fashion, so as not to further 'pathologise' the person.
- Why positive approaches - even to severely negative behaviours - are so important. And particularly, what are the key positive approaches and how do you apply them.
- Validation, what it is, how it is different from empathy, why it is so important, and how to get good at it.
- Validation Plus. Why validation, though marvellous, is never enough, even when it is relevant. The other half of the jigsaw.
- The creation of a clear self-image and good self-esteem, and why these are important.
- Self-efficacy: quite different from self-esteem, self-efficacy is one of the commonthreads of successful interventions with adolescents; a key concept which we can actively enhance in young people.
- Hope for the future. Why this is such an important concept, and how to stimulate people to plan and work towards their futures.
What the course will do for you:
- You will understand what damage can be done to individuals while they are developing, in neuropsychological terms.
- You will know what events can cause this damage, and that they are not always 'dramatic' events - though they can be.
- You will learn why people react disproportionately, self-destructively, or simply 'strangely', to certain situations, and how to help, using simple everyday interactions.
- You will learn about positive approaches to negative behaviour, and why it is so important - and counter-intuitive - to use them.
- You will know about - and how to use - a key technique, alleged to be the secret of friendship, and is certainly one of the secrets of influencing people who have been through damaging events.
- Slogans are good! And you will learn why, and have slogans you can use post-course, and be keen to develop your own.
- You will understand the key element which holds people back from even trying to make progress, how this is so obviously damaging, and how to overcome it.
- You will know how to create hope for the future, and understand why this is so important to do.
- You will understand the concept of counter-traumas, how to create them for others, and the result you can expect.
- Overall, you will understand the damage that events can cause to young people, and what you can do in everyday interactions to rectify it.
What you receive as a result of attending the training:
You will be registered as having attended the course, thereby gaining APT's Level 1 accreditation, and receive a certificate to this effect. The accreditation gives you access to online resources associated with the course and access to the online exam if you wish to uprate your APT accreditation to Level 2.
Your registration lasts indefinitely, whilst your accreditation lasts for 3 years from the date of completion and is renewable.
Your accreditation is given value by the fact of over 150,000 people having attended APT training. See APT accreditation for full details.
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Quick Links
Children & Adolescent Courses ❯
Anxiety in Children & Adolescents ❯
Developmental Trauma & Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs): Repairing the Damage™ ❯
Assessing Adolescents in Crisis ❯
Trauma-Focused CBT, for all ages ❯
Feedback Ratings.
We continuously monitor the quality of our training by obtaining feedback on the two key scales of relevance and presentation from every course delegate. Below are the average ratings for the last ten runnings of this course, which are updated periodically.
Face-to-Face
Presentation: 93%
Relevance: 96%
Online Live
Presentation: 94%
Relevance: 96%
Reviews.
APT prides itself on the feedback we receive about our courses. Below are just some of the great comments the Developmental Trauma & Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs): Repairing the Damage™ course has received.
"Without a doubt the most informative, relevant and enjoyable training I have attended to date.”
"I can honestly say as a Manager who has worked in Residential Care for 8 years that this was one of the most beneficial courses that I have been on. It was very well executed and the information was clear, well explained, interesting and beneficial … There has been relevant learning that I can take back to my team that will benefit our work practice in the future."
