6 days 

This in-person course uses a neuroscientific, healing-centred frame that demonstrates and explains the use of healing arts practices. It looks at the following metaphors:

• Trauma as a Boundary issue: Creating safety

People frequently experience feelings of fear, danger or threat. These feelings and experiences can affect their relationships with others. When traumatised, we become over-boundaried or under-boundaried. This module explores how we create safety by creating healthy boundaries.

• Trauma as a Wound: Finding expression

Trauma, from the Greek for “wound,” affects the psyche and can deepen without acknowledgement and care. Healing requires attention, expression, and offering voice and choice. This module explores how to support this process. Trauma also triggers survival responses that hinder healthy communication, making non-violent communication and conflict-resolution practices essential in schools.

• Trauma as a Cramp:  Creating rhythm and flow

A shock causes the body and psyche to tense or ‘cramp’. If this tension is not released, it can develop into fight, flight, or eventually a freeze response. This freeze leads to desynchronisation in the body, emotions, and mind. This module explores how we can recognise and respond to these states through rhythm, movement and ritual.

• Trauma as a Contagion: Finding Strength for Empathy

Trauma can feel contagious, as we absorb or mirror the stress responses of others — a process known as secondary traumatisation. This shows that trauma is not only individual but also collective, intergenerational, and transgenerational. Finding strength for empathy and compassion require the courage to get close. This module explores how we can do this.

• Trauma as a Storm: Finding your Ground

Trauma can unsettle our core beliefs about safety, predictability, and relationships, affecting how we think, interpret experiences, and make decisions. This session examines these cognitive impacts and supports the development of grounding strategies that help restore stability and clear thinking.

• Trauma as a Loss of Focus: Finding Direction

In a shocking moment — the acute phase — we often lose the ability to think clearly or focus. If this disorganisation is not regulated, it can develop into PTSD, and ongoing dysregulation can negatively affect brain development. This module focuses on:

• • how to support regulation during the acute phase, and
  • the impact of emotional trauma on brain development and stress pattern formation.

• Trauma as a Threshold: Managing the Threshold

Trauma can dismantle what is familiar, calling us to draw on courage and self-efficacy as we navigate an unfamiliar present and imagine a different future.  A threshold can be a doorway that alters the course of one’s life.  A threshold is also an edge — a point of intensity beyond which further consequences unfold, much like a pain threshold. This module will explore how trauma affects the peripheral nervous system and how our bodies automatically respond to fear and threat.

• Trauma as a Trigger: Finding Presence

A trigger is an internal or external signal perceived as danger, activating the nervous system. Trauma can cause emotional triggering, and recognising triggers—whether sensory or reminiscent of past trauma—is vital. Learning to understand and regulate these emotions, especially when working with children or others, addresses both.

• Trauma as Social Engagement: Working with the FAWN

Fawning and appeasing are reactionary strategies to create safety. Fawning, rooted in trauma, involves excessive people-pleasing and self-sacrifice to avoid conflict. Appeasement is a broader strategy of making concessions to prevent escalation. This module explores how trauma-induced incidents create these emotional responses and the underlying need for safety.

• Trauma as a Cry for Help: Emotional First Aid for Staying Motivated

Trauma is painful and impacts emotions, often prompting cries for help that can be hard to recognise. Emotional reactions may mobilise (anger, anxiety) or immobilise (numbness, dissociation). This module examines trauma-induced feeling responses and explores arts-based tools to maintain activation and engagement.

• Trauma as a Heart Issue: Finding our heart for collective problem solving.

Trauma can disrupt our relationship with self, others, and the environment, often leading to emotional disconnection as a means of self-protection. Healing involves safely expressing feelings and forming trusting relationships that restore connection and a sense of security. This module explores how trauma affects our capacity to connect, care, and relate, and investigates how arts-based activities can support reconnection and nurture collective resilience.

• Trauma as Post-Traumatic Growth: The hero’s journey to find new dreams

Trauma can open pathways to post-traumatic growth and transformation, often described as crossing a threshold into the unknown. Through this “Hero’s Journey,” we learn to regulate ourselves and to build trusting, safe community spaces that support growth and development in ourselves and others. In doing so, we begin to trust ourselves as active agents in our own lives, co-creating safer and more just environments while discovering new dreams, strengths, and inner resources.