Sometimes terrible things happen. Maybe a road traffic accident, or the traumatic loss of a loved one. When it’s all over, it’s like your body remembers. You have flashbacks, or wake up in the night sweating. You are constantly on edge and can’t relax.
After trauma, we need to make sense of what happened for ourselves. We need to make it part of our life story, something that happened in the past. We all have the capacity to do that. We have the potential to heal from the things that have happened to us.
Sometimes that process can get stuck. We continue to feel as if we are about to be hit by a car, or that we are in the hospital waiting for news. We can’t move on in our lives, because we are stuck in the worst moment.
There are things you can do about that. Trauma therapy (like EMDR) can help, but there are also ways in which you can help yourself and your child to process traumatic events, and it’s those things I talk about in my webinars and courses.
Living with your autistic child is like walking on eggshells. They sleep badly, they cling to you and they have extreme reactions to seemingly small events. They are very scared of particular things, and you aren't really sure why. Naomi will explain how trauma affects the brain - and why understanding trauma in autism requires us to look beyond major traumatic events to understand the person's individual experience.
In this mini course Naomi will talk about school trauma, how it occurs, what makes it worse and how parents can help. You'll leave with a new understanding of what has gone on for your child, why they are still affected by the past, and some ideas of what to do. This course will combine psychological theory with practical strategies and ideas.
Dr Naomi Fisher, clinical psychologist, will share with you how trauma and loss affect children and what their parents can do to help. With various handouts to download and extra audios, this course is a comprehensive and practical resource to help you support your child.
Some of you may not know that I am a EMDR trainer, as well as a clinical psychologist. EMDR is an evidence-based therapy, recommended in the NICE guidelines for PTSD and I’ve been using it since 2005. Most recently I have become an accredited trainer, meaning that I can now train other therapists in EMDR.
Illustration by Eliza Fricker (www.missingthemark.blog) When a child is struggling at school and become reluctant to attend, their parents are given advice. A lot of it is about how to ignore their child’s distress. Other parents say ‘We just don’t give them the option’ and professionals say ‘You need firm boundaries’. Parents are told that their child’s misery is ‘behaviour’ and that it will be reinforced if they ‘give in’. Others are told that it’s anxiety, and that by allowing children to avoid school, the anxiety will only get worse. This puts parents in an impossible situation. They are caught between their child’s obvious distress, often expressed through meltdowns, stomach aches and tears, and the advice which tells them to persist regardless. They’re told that if they are just consistent enough, things will get better. As one book on ‘Getting your Child Back to School’ says ‘Their complaints will taper off’.