A 1-day professional development workshop with Dr.Wendy Kelly (PhD), Clinical Psychologist.

Judi and Megan from ChildPlayWorks are pleased to offer the opportunity to participate in a 1-day professional development workshop with Dr Wendy Kelly, a Clinical Psychologist who has worked in the area of child maltreatment, foster care and mental health for over 30 years, including five years for Child Youth and Family Specialist Services (now Oranga Tamariki). She has completed a PhD and written a book entitled ‘Understanding children in foster care: Identifying and addressing what children learn from maltreatment’. She has a private practice specialising in trauma and foster care and is a Clinical Practice Advisor in the Clinical Psychology programme at Victoria University.

This workshop will focus on the impact of trauma on early attachment relationships and how this affects children’s view of themselves and other people, their development and their social and emotional well-being. It will also cover theory and provide ideas and techniques for understanding the issues facing maltreated and traumatised children and a practical method of working out what the child needs to learn from current relationships, both caregiving and therapeutic. The types of therapy useful for this population will be outlined but it will not cover how to deliver specific therapy.

The morning session will cover how children form attachment relationships, the different types of attachment and approaches to working with attachment issues.

The afternoon session will cover traumatic stress, it’s impact on the child and approaches to working with trauma. Attachment and trauma will then be looked at together through the Relational Learning Framework (RLF). The RLF was developed by the trainer to understand what children learn about themselves and other people from traumatic experiences, maltreatment and/or disruption of care. We will then consider how to develop a treatment plan to help the child change any negative beliefs they may have about themselves or others, based on the trauma they have experienced.

This workshop will be of interest and beneficial to all people who work alongside children and their families. Please register early to secure your place. Spaces for this 1-day workshop are strictly limited and registrations are on a ‘first in first served’ basis