How To Heal Childhood Trauma: Oprah & Dr. Bruce Perry Based

Childhood trauma need not forever define a child or adult’s future.

This course, which begins with a demonstration of two nervous system regulation exercises, provide an introduction into the  interventions available to children who are healing from trauma.

This course is accompanied further by an interview with Dr. Christie Mason PhD, LCSW, RPT-S, NMT Level II, who highlights the insightful work of Dr. Bruce Perry, including his carefully developed NMT, otherwise known as ‘Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics’.

This model ensures that each child is assessed to determine which parts of their brain and neural development were affected, at what point in their development, and at what age. The child is then prescribed a set of routines, exercises, and experiences that can help the child slowly grow the neural networks associated with those parts of the brain. The result is a wide and varied therapeutic approach to trauma treatment. NMT tailors therapy to individual needs, recognizing the non-uniform impact of trauma.

Some children will need to learn how to clap along to the rhythm of music, others slowly learn how to tolerate and enjoy skin-to-skin healthy touch, or to express their experiences through play, storytelling, painting, or drawing to help them process what happened to them. Sometimes these expressions of fragments of what happened to them will take place over and over again until they’ve pieced their story together in a way that makes a little bit more sense for them.

This course is enriched by discussions around play therapy, how to identify the signs of post traumatic play in children, and how neurodevelopmental theory contributes to the formation of interventions. The broad overview of the therapeutic interventions available to children healing from trauma, provided in this course, can be a beneficial tool for any parent or adult who works with children.