Understanding Complex Trauma and Attachment

This training is designed for clinical staff supporting clients living with the impacts of complex trauma. Complex trauma is the result of repeated experiences of adversity in childhood (physical, sexual, and emotional abuse) without the ability to access the support of a consistent caregiver. Without access to a caregiver’s support, children grow into adults who struggle to regulate their emotions, behaviours, and cognitions. This training will offer a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by survivors of prolonged childhood abuse and neglect. This training will also offer tools and strategies for stabilization.

Learning Objectives:

• Deepen learners’ empathic understanding of what it is like to experience interpersonal violence.
• Understand and identify specific trauma responses/adaptations among clients who have a history of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
• Understand attachment as a driver of emotional regulation and distress tolerance.
• Understand the role and value of therapeutic alliance.
• Understand fight, flight and freeze responses.
• Participants will be able to describe and identify complex post trauma stress or developmental trauma.
• Understand the difference between stabilization skills, containment, and exposure therapy.
• Understand the link between complex trauma and addictions (as well as other forms of self-harm, suicide and high-risk behaviours).

This event is an online training workshop. Ticket holders will receive an email with the invitation to join the training closer to the event start date.

Meet your trainer:

Heather Fredin, Registered Psychotherapist

Heather is a Registered Psychotherapist with the Navigating Onward (NavOn). She holds a master’s degree in Counselling Psychology, a Diploma in Art Therapy and a Bachelor’s Degree in Education. She has been working in community mental health for 25 years.

Heather encourages service providers to practice from a trauma-informed perspective. She believes that therapeutic goals must be client-centered, and help should come from a collaborative approach. She focuses her efforts on community/education and health collaborative partnerships and care pathways for children, youth and families seeking mental health support.

Heather teaches Systemic Practice (psychotherapy for families, couples, and groups) in the MA Counselling Psychology program at Western University. Heather is both the chair of the Youth Suicide Postvention Advisory for London and Middlesex County and the broader community network Suicide Prevention Middlesex London. She trains regularly on a wide variety of topics but of special interest is the topic of youth suicide prevention, intervention and postvention.

She is trained in the therapeutic modalities of: CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy), and she will soon be trained in the therapeutic and risk assessment model the “Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicide” otherwise known as CAMS.