Interpersonal trauma
About the pathway
Welcome to the Interpersonal trauma learning pathway. This pathway is for practitioners wanting to learn more about the impacts of trauma on infants and children and develop key practice skills to support their work with children who have experienced trauma.
Trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACES), such as extreme poverty, abuse and neglect, are common. For example, around 1 in 6 women and 1 in 9 men reported experiencing physical and/or sexual abuse before the age of 15,1 while emotional abuse is the most common reason for child protection substantiations.2
If left unchecked, trauma can disrupt children’s healthy development and increase their risk of experiencing physical and mental health difficulties throughout their lifetime. But poor outcomes are not inevitable.
This learning pathway is designed to help all practitioners to understand and support children and families who have been through or are currently experiencing trauma and adversity. It will provide you with key understandings about how trauma and adversity affect children’s wellbeing, and help grow your confidence in talking about experiences of trauma with your clients. You will learn trauma-informed strategies to sensitively engage children and families in your work, as well as how to help children overcome the shame, self-blame, secrecy and hopelessness that often comes with trauma and abuse.
Learning outcomes
As you progress through this learning pathway you will build your understanding and skills across a range of key areas, including:
- the impacts of trauma and adversity on infant and child mental health
- supporting children engage fully with you and begin to overcome the effects of trauma
- beginning a conversation with children and/or their parents who have experienced trauma • working with a child who is reluctant or ambivalent about attending your service
- offering the child a place to stand regarding their experience of trauma – identifying their skills, resilience, and acts of protest
- noticing your own worries or concerns in this work, and how this can affect your confidence or curiosity
- identifying the ways that self-blame operates, how it has been used by perpetrators and what can be done to help children move beyond these negative thoughts and emotions
- considering how the power difference between children and adults can be made overt in sessions to help children challenge their feelings of complicity
- considering the effects of secrecy in the child’s life, and how this secrecy affects their ability to move past the negative consequences of trauma; and
- finding a common language that helps children and parents to participate fully in conversations that will move them beyond secrecy, and form a team around the child that will support their recovery.
References
- ABS 2017. Personal safety, Australia, 2016. ABS cat. no. 4906.0. Canberra: ABS.
- AIHW 2019a. Child protection Australia: 2017–18. Child welfare series no. 70. Cat. no. CWS 65. Canberra: AIHW.