Reparenting the Hurt Child with Dr Dave Ziegler

Vulnerable children can be hard to understand and even harder to work with. The effects of trauma from abuse, neglect, violence or other major life events can cause significant disruptions to their psychological, neurological, and emotional development. These disruptions can manifest in the form of complex and challenging behaviours that can last well beyond the childhood years and provide real challenges to even the most skilled therapists, teachers, parents and helping professionals.

Dr Dave Ziegler is a psychologist, trainer, author and consultant, who for the last 35 years has lived alongside troubled children in the Jasper Mountain treatment program in Oregon, providing him a first-hand glimpse of the inner world of these children. Over this time he and his team have combined psychology, neuroscience, human development, and holistic approaches to develop interventions that have shown remarkable outcomes with very challenging and disturbed children.

In this seminar Dave shares his insightful view into the unique aspects he has encountered in the therapeutic reparenting of complex and vulnerable children, along with outlining a collection of practical intervention strategies that over time have proven to be most effective at positively changing the lives of these children

Some of the key messages Dave will discuss include:

• The importance of treating the whole child, not just their symptoms. Individuals are complex and multiple factors interact to create any disturbance, so interventions need to have multiple dimensions to be most effective.

• 10 strategies that go beyond common behaviour management models which have been tested and shown to be effective with even the most difficult children. Including approaches that focus on the child’s self-perception and sense of purpose, the nature of the child’s environment, the helper and the institutional systems of care.

• When practice based evidence can be more important than evidenced based practice. What to do when nothing seems to work.

• Neurological Reparative Therapy. All successful interventions must impact the brain. What steps that are necessary to change the child’s neuro-biology, therefore altering perceptions, emotions and behaviours for long term change.

Reparenting the Hurt Child is a compassionate, no-nonsense guide for any adult involved in the therapeutic care of children with developmental trauma or attachment difficulties, providing information and insights from a widely acclaimed residential treatment program. This seminar is suitable for carers and professionals including residential carers, practitioners, teachers, counsellors and other professionals involved in supporting children in out of home care and their families/ carers.

Dave Ziegler the Founder and Executive Director of Jasper Mountain, a residential counselling program, school, assessment and treatment program for children with complex trauma and attachment difficulties. As a psychologist Dr Ziegler has worked and lived alongside hundreds of America’s most vulnerable children. He has written numerous books and assessment tools including: The Attachment Assessment Scale, Traumatic Experience and the Brain, Achieving Success With Impossible Children, Neurological Reparative Therapy, Attachment, The Social Foundation of a Successful Life, and Promoting Healthy Rather than Unhealthy Behaviour. This is Dave’s final visit to Australia before he retires. If you have seen him speak this is your last chance! We anticipate that these seminars will be heavily subscribed and would encourage you to register early to avoid disappointment.