The Southwest Ohio Chapter of the Ohio Association for Infant Mental Health

2016 Fall Conference

The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma and Loss: Implications for Our Work and Our World Presented by Michael Trout

Friday, October 21, 2016 8:00am-4:00pm at the Sharonville Convention Center

Fee: $85 by 9/2/16 and $115 after 9/2/16

Online registration is now closed. Please contact Carol Hettel at clhettel@yahoo.com to register.

CEUs 5.5: Approved for Ohio Counselors, Social Workers and Marriage and Family Therapists.

Includes Continental Breakfast and Lunch

This day-long event will explore what we know about how all experience, real and perceived, gets passed down from one generation to another, and how trauma sticks. We will wonder how it is that young children develop ideas about themselves and their place in the world that are so obviously irrational, yet clung to as if the child’s very survival is at stake. Mr. Trout will employ a storytelling method to help us consider how narratives—both coherent and garbled—emerge in all of us, and to suggest how narratives can be disrupted in favor of optimal development. We will try to imagine a world in which children feel seen and heard and known, rather than diagnosed and abandoned. We will end by taking note of an uncommon idea in our field: that we human beings are as interdependent as are all the other creatures in nature.

Objectives:

Participants will be able to write 4 sentences describing the narrative of a child known to them in child welfare, the classroom, the home, or the consulting room.
Participants will be able to write a working definition of epigenetics, and describe how it works in child development.
Participants will be able to offer one example of cultural or historical trauma.
Participants will be able to describe how an incoherent narrative might influence a child’s behavior in care, in the classroom, or at home.

Agenda:

8:00-9:00AM - Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:00-9:30AM – Case example: how prenatal trauma emerged in a 4-year-old hyperactive child, and how storytelling was used by the adoptive parents to support a narrative they could all use to calm down

9:30-10:20AM – The problem of the incoherent narrative in young children of trauma

10:20-10:30AM – BREAK

10:30-11:00AM – Understanding epigenetics: the impact of lived and perceived experience on the expression (or suppression) of our genes

11:00-11:30 – Historical and cultural trauma: why our sluggishness in addressing what happened to the child’s ancestors and to the child’s community, puts the service delivery system at risk.

11:30AM-Noon – Q&A

Noon-1:00PM – LUNCH

1:30-2:15PM - Hope: Novel attitudes, novel approaches

2:15-2:50 – Changing a child’s mind: What would it look like to get foster and adoptive parents to give up on didactic, punitive, rewards-based or other systems that are not working for them, and go directly to challenging the trauma-based narrative?

2:50-3:00PM: BREAK

3:00-3:30 – Conclusion of presentation on challenging the trauma-based narrative

3:30-4:00PM – Q&A

Presenter: Mr. Trout graduated from Alma College (B.A., cum laude, honors in Philosophy) and Central Michigan University (M.A., Psychology), and did his specialized training in infant psychiatry at the Child Development Project, University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry, under Prof. Selma Fraiberg. He is the director of the Infant-Parent Institute in Urbana, Illinois, which engages in research, clinical practice and clinical training related to problems of attachment. He was the founding president of the International Association for Infant Mental Health, was on the charter Editorial Board of the Infant Mental Health Journal and served as Vice-President for the United States for the World Association for Infant Mental Health.

Mr. Trout is co-author of See Me as a Person: Creating Therapeutic Relationships with Patients and Their Families, The Jonathon Letters, and Baby Verses: The Narrative Poetry of Infants and Toddlers. Mr. Trout has also produced 15 documentary films that are in use in universities and clinics around the world, including four films on the unique perspective of babies on divorce, adoption, loss and domestic violence.

Thank you to our Gold Member Sponsors:

Thank you to our Silver Member Sponsors:

Thank you to our Additional Sponsors:

Please contact Carol Hettel for sponsorship opportunities for this conference at clhettel@yahoo.com.