Chronically traumatized children can struggle with dissociation in daily life or even have a dissociative disorder. It is not always clear from the start, and suddenly you find yourself feeling lost and out of your depth. This happened to me at the start of my learning journey thirty years ago. Dissociative disorders are quite rare, so it is difficult to find someone more experienced and specialized than yourself to treat these clients. By upskilling yourself you can help your clients yourself, and I guarantee you that you will start to recognise more children with dissociative disorders that were previously overlooked.
In this three-day workshop you will learn how to recognise dissociative disorders and how to set up treatment for dissociative disorders in children and young people. This is a practical workshop, with minimal theory, where you will practise with cases. Participants need to have experience in working with children with chronic trauma and dissociation. Participants can have a therapeutic role or work with these children indirectly by for example providing clinical support to residential teams working with these children.
I hope you will learn that working with dissociative disorders in children is not scary and difficult, but an amazing creative journey leaving you eager to do more.
Content day 1
In the first day I will start with some theory explaining dissociation and dissociative disorders in children, what it is, how it develops, what it looks like, how to recognise it. We will discuss the available assessment tools and the process of assessing dissociative disorders in children. Then we will discuss the role of family, network in the development of dissociation, intergenerational dissociation, and how trauma and attachment are entangled. You will then get an overview of the state of the art, the latest research, treatment models, guidelines on adults and children. Then we will discuss how to set up a phased treatment, which elements are needed and how to structure all the different interventions in a practical way. We will discuss questions such as why children don’t remember traumatic experiences and how these memories can be made accessible. I will illustrate the treatment process with several cases of children and teens with dissociative disorders.
You will then put this into practise by doing an assessment for your own case, or case example. We will practise psychoeducation metaphors and discuss how to use these. We will do exercises to increase your understanding of what it is like to have dissociative parts, how this creates difficulties. Then you will use the Sleeping Dogs Tool to analyse potential barriers for trauma processing for your cases. We will go through the most common barriers for children with dissociative disorders, connecting these to the theory explaining why these form barriers.
Content day 2
In day 2 we will plan interventions for our cases and practise with prioritising and staying on track, which can be very difficult with these cases where there are so many problems in daily life. We will discuss how to analyse and understand difficult behaviours such as self-harming, suicidal behaviour or violence or sleeping and eating problems, as protective parts and how to use the internal world of the child to make these more manageable. We will discuss and practise interventions such as orienting dissociative parts in the now, increasing safety, reducing dissociation, mutism, or conversion symptoms in daily life.
We will also dive into the difficulties in working with the family and network, including the perpetrator(s) such as the child’s loyalty, ongoing abuse and unsafety, guilt and shame and moral injury, intergenerational dissociation. In your cases, where things often seem impossible and hopeless, you will practise looking for opportunities or ways in which the family and network can contribute and reconnect. We will discuss how to assess when the child is ready for trauma processing, what we can expect during and after as a result, and how to support them during and after. We will practise troubleshooting when things go wrong. In the weeks in between day 2 and 3, you have the opportunity to work with your clients with the plans you made.
Content day 3
In the third day we will spend time on your cases looking at the successes, challenges and any questions you may have. We will practise planning long term, predicting outcomes and preparing for those. We will discuss what to do in the integration phase, how to plan cycles of going back to trauma processing and how to assess when treatment is ended. We will discuss general aspects such as (counter) transference, setting and sticking to boundaries, relationship management, trusting instead of saving the child, conflict in the team, collaboration with other professionals, staying focused, and most important having fun.
Theoretical background
The content of the workshop is based on several theories and treatment models. In my early days, there was no knowledge on dissociative disorders in children, and I did my first trainings with clinicians working with adults with dissociative disorders, such as Suzette Boon, Kathy Steele, Onno van der Hart, Roger Solomon, Carol Forgash, Jim Knipe. Researchers such as Ellert Nijenhuis, Bethany Brand, Simone Reinders, Bruce Perry, Martin Dorehay have contributed to our understanding of dissociative disorders.
Then more clinicians started teaching and writing about children, and I learned so much from clinicians such as Joy Silberg, Fran Waters, Renee Marks-Potgieter, Sandra Wieland, Valerie Sinason, Ralf Vogt. I joined the Child and Adolescent Committee of the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation and co-authored the ESTD Guidelines for the treatment of children with dissociative disorders (2017), which we are currently updating.
My practical and pragmatic treatment approach forms an integration of what I have learned over the years for all these great clinicians and researchers.
Participants
Participants need to have experience in working with children with chronic trauma and dissociation. Participants can have a therapeutic role or work with these children indirectly by for example providing clinical support to residential teams working with these children. Participants need to have done the workshop Treating Chronically Traumatized Children with the Sleeping Dogs method: workshop Treating Chronically Traumatized Children with the Sleeping Dogs method or the online workshop Treating Chronically Traumatized Children with the Sleeping Dogs method 6-7 Febr 2025. We will discuss the use of EMDR and -TF-CBT with these clients, but participants do not need to be trained in EMDR or TF-CBT. If you are wondering whether you quality to attend this workshop, please send me an email on ictc@ariannestruik.com.
Register and pay
Australian with GST
Non-Australian (no GST)
The ICTC uses Tickettailor for registration and payment. Payments can be made with Stripe or Paypal and with Applepay. Payments with IDEAL can be made via Stripe. Multiple participants can be registered at the same time.
This Masterclass needs a minimum number of participants to go ahead.
About the trainer
Arianne Struik is a Clinical Psychologist, Family Therapist and EMDR Consultant, originally from the Netherlands. She is director of the Institute for Chronically Traumatized Children (ICTC) from which she provides specialized trauma treatment in remote areas, as well as workshops, training, supervision and research. She developed the award-winning Sleeping Dogs method, described in the book Treating Chronically Traumatized Children and teaches internationally on the treatment of trauma and dissociation in children. She is member of the ESTD Child and Adolescent Committee and the Australian Psychological Society EMDR Interest Group national committee
Date
- 7, 8 July and 4 Sept 2025 Online via Zoom
Time
9.00 am – 4.00 pm Brisbane time
Costs
1150 AUD ex GST
Early bird 1049 AUD ex GST until 1 April 2025
Information & inquiries
ictc@ariannestruik.com
