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This month, PESI UK invites you to connect with Dr Pat Ogden, Dr Stephen Porges, Professor Jeremy Holmes and other key voices in trauma and attachment. Taking place from April 15-16, this special two-day conference will consider the needs of some of our most vulnerable clients in this time of global stress.

We are all impacted by xenophobia and racism, whether we are the ones being wounded, or the ones intentionally or unwittingly doing the wounding. Ahead of a free PESI UK Clinical Spotlight webcast on 1st April, author, psychologist and yoga therapist educator Dr Gail Parker explores the implications for our psychological health and wellbeing of living in a culture of unhealed ethnic and racial trauma – and the importance of self-care practices for promoting post-traumatic growth.

Today is Care Day, when the world marks the rights of children and young people with care experience. Sheetal Amin, a psychotherapist with a special interest in working with developmental trauma and ‘looked after’ children, explains why responding to their complex needs has to mean adapting the boundaries of the therapeutic frame.

The universal languages of play and creativity can be crucial to work with unaccompanied minors who have arrived in the UK seeking asylum. As we mark Children’s Mental Health Week 2021, with its theme of ‘Express Yourself’, Integrative Arts Therapist Sheetal Amin invites us to listen to some of the experiences these children share with her – and reflects on the role of creative practice in helping them externalise and make sense of their trauma.  

How do we ground and resource a trauma survivor when the risk remains real? For refugees who have been ‘resettled’ in areas of the UK with high crime rates, the triggers are everywhere. Jude Boyles reflects on supporting the search for internal and external safety among Syrian and Iraqi refugees.

How does trauma impact women? How can we support them to recover and to thrive? Learn from the leading female voices in trauma therapy as PESI UK announces a live and online Women, Trauma and Mental Health Master Series Conference. Subtitled ‘Empowering Women with the Skills and Insight to Thrive’, the two-day event will bring together pioneering women in the field of trauma work, including Pat Ogden, Janina Fisher, Kathy Steele, Judith Herman and Babette Rothschild, sharing clinical insights from neuroscience and attachment research to resilience training and body work.

In this guest article from Psychotherapy Networker, pioneering trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk took aim not only at the politics within the therapy field that determine what diagnoses get into the DSM, but the politics in the larger arena that lead people to ignore the prevalence of trauma in society.

We are in the midst of Mental Health Awareness Week. But for Benjamin Fry, the term is highly misleading. The founder of residential trauma treatment centre Khiron House, Fry believes we can only understand ‘mental health’ by going back to the body, getting curious about the nervous system, and helping our clients to see their ‘invisible lions’.

Creativity is an energy that is available to all of us. Making room for a song, poem or image in a session can help us out of therapeutic ruts, turbo-boost clinical work, and gently assist traumatised clients to unfreeze their unconscious. So, asks Sarah Van Gogh in the final part of her blog series on creativity and trauma – wouldn’t we be foolish not to invite its healing power into the consulting room, whatever our therapeutic modality?

Working imaginatively with what a client brings, rather than interpreting it, can help us to amplify unconscious material and explore feelings. This, argues Sarah Van Gogh, is where real change lies. In the next two parts of her series on creativity and trauma, she presents case extracts that reveal how imaginary dialogue helped a client with chronic back pain.