Advanced Level 1 Training Track:

Interventions with children and adolescents 

Instructor: Dr. Peter Jakob

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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.

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NVR offers the prospect of moving beyond the impasse created by children’s repeated aggression towards family members, caregivers, school or community, by helping them reconnect.

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This Advanced Level 1 NVR training track - with a focus on Attachment and Trauma - weaves together several therapeutic learnings to help generate movement through reconnection: the power of peaceful resistance that is offered by nonviolent resistance principles and methods; systemic therapy – especially narrative and solution-focused traditions; and trauma- and attachment-informed perspectives.

 

This integration of understandings and practical methods helps the family, school or foster home leave behind coercion and relational rupture by moving towards ‘caring dialogue’ to begin a process of healing.

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The course will teach:

• How practitioners can help facilitate emotionally safe interaction between the wider system and clients to build a caring community, creating a context for the nuclear family or home to become a healing environment;

• How to implement NVR methods using embodiment and imagination to help parents overcome emotional distress, and

• How to help develop a child focus and move adults and young people toward genuine dialogue.

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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.  

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Recent publications related this track

 

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

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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. ​