Safe place and residential care

Safe/calm place is an imagery stabilization exercise, an important resource the child can use during trauma processing when emotions become too distressing. Safe place can be viewed as a form of controlled dissociation [1]. However, children in residential care having experienced developmental and complex traumas may not have developed secure foundations for attachments and face more difficulties to identify a stable safe place in therapy [2]. Severely traumatized children and adolescents in residential care have difficulty with this safety task [3]. This presentation aims at presenting 12 drawings of safe places of children that have been referred for EMDR therapy at the Mental Health Unit the “House of the Child” and, also, live in host houses of the association “the Smile of the Child”. “The House of the Child”, an innovative specialized mental health unit that provides multi-disciplinary assessment, diagnosis and treatment services for children and adolescents survivors of abuse and neglect. In many of the drawings, the need for privacy emerged and particular patterns observed will be discussed. The second aim of this presentation is to present the conclusions of a pilot focus group in which three EMDR therapists participated (two clinical psychologists and a child psychiatrist). The EMDR therapists work psychotherapeutically with children in residential care and discuss both the obstacles to establishing a safe place working with this population and therapeutic considerations based on developmental aspects of the Neurosequential Model of Perry [4]. The output of the focus group will be presented through a SWOT analysis. Our findings could have implications on the conceptualization of stabilization in therapeutic work with children in residential care. Based on our data, it would be helpful to view stabilization and trauma processing as a circular process rather than distinct stages as they may be continually interwoven in therapy.

Conference

English

Giorgos Tsouvelas
Michaila Chondrokouki
Xenia Antoniou
George Nikolaidis

Tsouvelas, G., Chondrokouki, M., Antoniou, X., & Nikolaidis, G. (2021, June). Safe place and residential care. Poster presented at the 20th EMDR Europe Association Conference, Virtual