When speaking about therapies for children Peter Mandel has referenced the work of neuro-psychiatrist Professor Teicher and his team stating that all feelings and experiences of the pre-natal time are stored in the Limbic brain from the sixth week of pregnancy. Subsequently abuse experiences, psychological traumas without the use of violence, blows to the head or sexual abuse affect the Limbic system, Corpus Collosum and the temporal lobes of the brain and these experiences condition the development of hemispheric specialization in the brain.

While adverse fetal and early child experiences can lead to physical and chemical disruptions in the brain that can last a lifetime, children are not doomed to poor outcomes. Development is a highly interactive process, the environment in which one develops before and soon after birth provides powerful experiences that can chemically modify certain genes in ways that define how they are expressed. In-fact severe neglect appears to be at least as great a threat to health and development as physical abuse. Children who have been traumatized need to be in environments that restore their sense of safety, control and predictability and they require therapeutic care to facilitate their recovery.

In this seminar we’ll extend on the therapies presented in Fausto Pagnamenta’s wonderful book “Children in the Light” to present some new possibilities for working with children to help restore their capacity to adapt and thrive in spite of adversity through interactive supportive relationships, biological systems and gene expression.