Facilitating Healing, Resilience and Hope for Survivors of Human Trafficking Part 1: Hardwired for Connection on May 17th, 2023

–and–

Facilitating Healing, Resilience and Hope for Survivors of Human Trafficking Part 2: The Healing Power of Connection on May 18th, 2023

Location:
Nashville-Davidson County Office of Family Safety
610 Murfreesboro Pike
Nashville, TN 37210

Time:
9 am to 4:30 pm

When a survivor of complex trauma, like human trafficking, demonstrates challenging behavior, those attempting to assist the victim can often fall into a cycle of frustration and power struggle, resulting in a lose/lose outcome.  

Neuroscience is demonstrating that some of the most challenging behaviors connected with assisting trauma survivors are actually biologically based fear responses more related to fear-based dysregulation than intractable behavior.  

With this in mind, we will examine how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and compounding adverse toxic stressors (CATS) create repeated fear responses and disrupt the "felt safety" (neuroception) needed for the attachment and regulation centers of the brain to work properly.  

With this as a base, we will place behavior into context culturally and environmentally with trauma-informed biographical timelines and brain-based interventions to help create the environment needed to improve cooperation, participation, and outcomes.  

We will also explore how parallel process and secondary trauma impacts everyone working with complex trauma survivors and what can be done to lessen and address them.  

By looking at what research tells us and what our work experiences have shown us, we will develop strategies to assist in negotiating this work that is as important as it is challenging.