Are you a therapist who works therapeutically with children and young people?
What do you need to understand about this work that enables you to relax, find context and use your skillset confidently?
What is a contextual approach?
What are effective procedures for this work?
What do you need to have in place to protect yourself as a therapist and the young people you work with?
Do you often feel weighed down by expectation and responsibility?
Does it feel difficult to understand what it is you can realistically achieve?
Do you feel frustrated by outcomes?
How can you set boundaries that will enable you to concentrate on your work?
What is good enough?
Would you like to understand this work in greater depth and gain the answers to the above questions
Then this may well be an essential and insightful course for you to consider!
Overview and Training Context
Providing a therapeutic intervention to children and young people is a specialised area of therapy. Therapists who choose to work in this area will have already trained to work with adults and then will have committed to significant additional approved study/training, which will enable them to have gained approved and specialist additional qualifications to be able to practice safely and ethically with young people.
Given the commitment required to participate in this work, therapists who work with children, have decided on some level, with absolute intention to support the most vulnerable members of our society. There is motivation and a genuine burning passion to provide a significant contribution to this specific and complex area.
So, what gives someone a passion to work with a traumatised child? Maybe a passion to work with children or maybe the therapist themselves suffered adversity as a child and they are able to emphasise with just how damaging early traumatic events can be for children. After all, the right intervention, provided early enough, with a therapist that the child connects well with, can go a long way to minimising the longer-term emotional effects of this trauma. In fact, early work can be an essential factor for ensuring a longer-term preventative approach, rather than sometime in the distant future attempting to “cure” well ingrained adult mental health difficulties which are rooted in early child trauma. Adult therapists who work with children are very aware of the devastating legacy of experiencing early traumatic events.
In my experience, therapists who work with children and young people know how much difference a strong therapeutic alliance can make to a young life and they genuinely wish to offer their specific therapeutic skills to help the child to process early traumatic or upsetting experiences, with the intention of making a difference to the child’s outcomes later in their adult life. I am sure you can see how important it is that therapists want to work with children, know how to work with children and feel satisfied enough with their work and contribution to the work that they remain in this role for the long term.
But sadly, this is not the case. Many therapists who started this work with unrivalled commitment and passion, end up feeling time limited, constricted, influenced, overwhelmed with expectation, take on huge amounts of accountability and as a result become generally frustrated and at worse burnt out to the point that they leave this field of work completely.
This is where this continuous professional development course content becomes valuable.
My Observations and Approach
Prior to my own training in therapy, I have worked in the voluntary sector and schools within contracting and funding. I now have a history of clinical practice and facilitation of supervision in private practice, voluntary sector and schools. In addition, I have experience of the commissioning of therapeutic services for these specific environments.
By both academic research within my training and subsequent master’s degree, and through clinical observation during many thousands of clinical hours in practice and in providing supervision, my findings lead to the suggestion that there is a gap in our “real time, day to day” knowledge base within this work that will lead to frustrations in those supporting traumatised children. There is also a gap lying in the limitations of our own awareness/consciousness of child development/need, and the contextual perspectives that are crucial to our abilities to effectively provide support to children and ensure positive outcomes.
I want to reduce the pressure and accountability and pressure that we, as professionals can place on ourselves by providing an alternative perspective in which we can find context, feel confident in where our role sits and the contribution that we can make within realistic parameters.
I want to show you the wider context, and allow you to reflect on what this means in such a way that I believe may well change your perspectives and the way in which you approach and understand your work. In a way in which work becomes more manageable, informed and therefore safer.
The value in my training is my capacity to use the powers that lie in therapy, and to integrate practical knowledge that applies to real time daily work, to demonstrate to you, in the context of your work, the deeper and more complex layers that remain obstacles to our current way of responding to our own, and the child’s needs.
My training does not, and will never replicate a text book. The root of my delivery will always come from personal experience and my way of creating a concept that will support you in your understanding of the reality of practice with children and young people and the wider contexts of this work that I consider essential understanding in order to be effective in your responses to this work.
Uninformed interventions, even with good intent will lead to bad and unsafe practice, stress in professionals. This will negatively impact a child’s wellbeing as much as the distress they have experienced and at its worst validates trauma and negative internal beliefs rather than removing them.
What Will This Course Teach Me?
During this course, I will challenge you to reflect on your work and to consider perspectives outside of your own. I will demonstrate to you how to be effective in your work with children and young people. How to understand context and what lies beneath expectation. I will show you how to trust your instincts, how to stand up for what you do, and how to work with awareness of the challenges that will arise as a matter of course, but that may currently impact your stress levels and motivations. You will also see how un-informed interventions and gaps in the knowledge of professionals can harm wellbeing and unravel what we are trying to achieve.
It is my aim to keep professionals motivated and informed to do this work in the longer term and to enhance traditional trauma informed approaches, to expose the challenges to intervention, and to contribute to the current and future provision of ethical, safe effective support, together with, coordinated, integrated multi-agency interventions.
As for the children themselves, they are not just the powerless victims, but they are often controlled and labelled even by the systems that will support them. Not only do children carry forward the legacy of unresolved trauma, but often this is together with a label that may be detrimental to their identity.
My Background and Motivations to Improve Professionals Knowledge and Service Knowledge
My interest in training in specific areas, mirrors certain personal experiences. This is a powerful motivator for me, and a strength as it gives me the ability to provide you with personal and professional insight into what it feels like to be a child entering therapy and what it can feel like to be a therapist who is trying to provide an effective and targeted intervention that will make a difference.
I feel that it would be wrong of me not to use my experience as a child therapist and supervisor, and my unique creativity and way of communicating this to play my part in educating therapeutic professionals about the wider contextual approach which is paramount to understanding and finding our place of contribution while minimising our own frustrations as therapists working with children and young people.
It is important to understand what may actually constitute as a good outcome, and how the limitations of our knowledge with regards to this can increase our frustrations within the work and that subsequently impact the therapist’s own wellbeing and their longer-term motivations to continue to support children and young people.
I know that truly informed practice supports our capacity to work towards a preventative approach which advocates our wellbeing but also resolve, repair and more positive outcomes for children, rather than an approach which may validate the traumatic lifetime legacy for the child, who could go onto endure a much later and more complex “cure” based approach.
Through my training, I am able to use my experience to support professionals within their work, and in turn the children who may have too found themselves in situations where they are unable to have their basic needs met and instead find themselves traumatized. It is their right to shake off this legacy too, and not have to re-experience this trauma by receiving un-informed therapeutic approaches or misunderstanding within schools and other services support. By improving our knowledge as professionals, we gain the capacity to play our part in supporting this process.
A Little More About Me
I am an experienced and accredited Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor.
I draw on my experience of facilitating many thousands of clinical practice hours with adults, children and young people, as well as my experience of commissioning (setting up) therapeutic services for a number of charitable organisations.
As an experienced Clinical Supervisor, my supervision services are approved with a number of universities and colleges. I work with individual qualified and trainee practitioners, groups, schools and other social care establishments. I supervise the practice of adults, but I am also deeply passionate about supporting and upholding our professional, ethical and informed approaches to practice with children and young people.
My wish is to use my unique skillset to contribute my part in maintaining and developing best and informed practice within our profession. I believe in extensive and continuous commitment to my study and personal development. The more informed I am, the more I am able to support my clients, and to collaborate with other practitioners and services.
I wish to contribute to the further development of other professionals in the areas in which my skillset lies. This is important work as un-informed professionals and slap dash services can certainly have the capacity to be more harmful to client wellbeing and safety than good. A recent podcast discussing the benefits of therapy suggested that 90% of therapists can create more damage to wellbeing while only 10% are considered so skilled that they really, really change lives for the better. If this statement is correct, this is an alarming statistic and shows that we must all become accountable for investing in ourselves so that we are able to provide the safeguarding, care and outcomes that our clients are entitled to.
In my career, I have a passion for educating professionals using my unique and intuitive concepts and real time, practical training which reflects daily practice. My intentions are always of improving/developing knowledge, strengthening professional practice, strengthening professional relationships and ultimately, safeguarding and changing the outcomes of the client in difficulty. I believe my strength has always been my ability to use my personal insights, and observations from experience in a way in which I am able to interweave these into practice. These insights help to create a deeper understanding of specific difficulties in a way in which we improve our own awareness and the outcome for our clients.
I was myself a traumatised child. I am sensitive in nature to external energies and unspoken messages/intentions, I am a deep thinker. I hold a particular interest in working with anxious and panic feelings, domestic and sexual abuse, early trauma and traumatic experiences, the mother/attachment wound and the impact of this, existential crisis, death and dying and I have worked hard to gain relevant further qualifications/experience within these specific areas.
The Practicalities
The course will provide you with seven hours of CPD training and an attendance certificate, you will also be issued with a course manual, which will have inside the details of everything that we will discuss on the day itself.
Please note that this day will be limited to 10 attendees only. This is so that we are able to interact fully, together as we review the course material. For this reason, please book early to avoid disappointment.
Dates Available
The next course will take place on Saturday 18th January 2025
Course capacity: 8
Please book early to avoid disappointment
Timings and Pricing
The day will begin at 9.00am (Registration from 8.50am) and will finish at 5pm. There will be refreshment breaks mid-morning and mid-afternoon and a lunch break.
The cost for the day will be £130.00 per delegate which is payable on booking, a comprehensive course manual will be provided.
How to Book
To book onto this event please contact me on my email: michellevickers@protonmail.com
I will then send you the payment details. Please then fill in the registration form at the bottom of this page.
Once I have received back your completed registration form and payment, I will confirm your place on the course.
To enquire or to book this training please use the form below. Once the form has been submitted, please rest assured that I will be in contact with you as soon as I am able:
Enquiry & Booking Form
I do lecture for outside services with the aim being to provide educational information within specific areas. Please find below information of services that I have worked with.
