Master Class: 

Child, Family and Trauma-focused NVR Therapy and Practice 

Instructor: Dr. Peter Jakob

​

Harmful behaviors in children tend to adversely affect them, their caregivers, and their relationships. Whether or not originally driven by exposure to trauma, the very act of repeatedly hurting others or oneself creates an impasse marked by feelings of helplessness and hopelessness for the family, foster family or residential care home. This impasse can worsen, when adults develop a narrative of the child as a ‘problem’ or as a victim, and even more so in contexts of social inequality, racism and sexism.

​

This Advanced Level training provides clinicians and other practitioners with the requisite knowledge and skills to practice NVR competently with families that have experienced high levels of abuse and/or disadvantage.

​

The overall prevalence of significant trauma in families referred for NVR can be estimated to lie at around or over 40%. The knowledge and skill-base taught on this course is transferrable for working with a general population of NVR referrals, where children and adolescents present with serious aggressive, harmful and self-destructive behaviours (so-called ‘externalising problems’), but also serious difficulties relating to self-harm such as suicidal behaviour or self-injury (so-called ‘internalising problems’). The difficulties to which the theoretical understandings and methodological elements of the course apply may or may not be concurrent with neuro-diverse presentations in children and young people.

​

The course leads participants into an understanding of the family as a potentially ‘healing system’, whereby the clinician or practitioner attends to three system levels in facilitating the transformative generation of such a healing system: creating an emotionally safe wider (communication) system around the family, utilising NVR principles and methods in helping parents and/or other caregivers process traumatic experience, and finally,  developing a child focus in NVR. Apart from addressing transformative processes within the family of origin, adoptive family or foster family, the course also introduces key elements of working with residential services for children and adolescents.

​

About the instructor 

Peter Jakob is a leading teacher, contributor and thinker in the NVR movement. His contributions includes an adaptation of NVR to trauma, and paths to reinstate the broken dialog of care. Peter helped to introduce NVR in the UK in the early 2,000's, and is now supporting the effort to introduce it to professionals and caregivers in North America. Read more about Peter.  

​

More information about this course will be provided soon. Please check back with us later. 

​

Recent publications related this track

 

Jakob, P. & ‘Sarah’ (2021). Beyond parenting: Therapeutic integration of non-violent resistance and narrative therapy. Context 175, 18-22.

​

Beckers, W., Jakob, P. & Schreiter, L. (2021). Imaginary methods in systemic therapy using nonviolent resistance: a sense of mattering and parental presence. Family Process, 00, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12694

 

Jakob, P. (2019). Child-focussed family therapy using nonviolent resistance: hearing the voice of need in the traumatised child. In E. Heismann, J. Jude & E. Day (eds.): Non-violent resistance innovations in practice. Brighton: Pavillion.

 

Jakob, P. (2018).  Multi-stressed families, child violence and the larger system: an adaptation of the nonviolent model. Journal of Family Therapy 40, 25-44. ​