Restoring Resilience

Restoring Resilience (RR) is excited to partner with parents, educators, counsellors, therapists, practitioners, families, and educational settings to provide a trauma prevention and resolution framework when engaging with children.

We at Restoring Resilience believe that for any child to thrive, an ecological perspective is vital as a child cannot be viewed in isolation or separate to its family, culture, school, and community. A child’s health and wellbeing are inextricably interdependent on the quality of relationships with counsellors, therapists, practitioners, educators/schools, parents, and families. The program invites all significant adults in a child’s life to share in a psychobiological understanding of physiological drivers in child behaviour. It is essential parents, teachers and counsellors learn how a child’s capacity to feel safe, connected and regulated, is developed and cultivated in relational neurobiology.

The Restoring Resilience ‘Grow – Working with Children’ program provides a series of workshops for parents, educators and counsellors to ensure that all significant adults in a child’s life have a shared lens on behaviour and responses. The workshops incorporate Gestalt theory to support relational safety, attachment and connection, Polyvagal theory to demystify drivers of disruptive and challenging behaviour and Somatic Experiencing interventions to release activation, reset the nervous system and restore resilience and social engagement systems. The synthesis of these modalities is potent and has been translated so children can start learning the fundamental and necessary skills for nervous system regulation from as young 3yo.

The Program introduces the ‘GROW Parenting Kit’ which is a resource adapted from Polyvagal Theory to be used with kids (3-12yo). The kit comprises a large colourful visual map to help children identify emotional states and learn the skill of noticing and tracking interoception. The training provides a menu of Somatic Experiencing interventions to support the child’s nervous system to return to a state of safety, connection and wellbeing when stuck in stress physiological states of fight, flight, and freeze. The GROW Parenting Tools Kit can be used in counselling and therapeutic sessions, at home with parents/caretakers and in classrooms with educators, this will ensure the child is attuned and responded to with consistency and predictability.

The ‘GROW – Working with Children’ program is ecological; therefore the health and wellbeing of parent, therapist, and educator must be triaged as a priority. In turn the ‘GROW Parenting’ and GROW – Parent Self Care’ workshops are essential to the training. A parent’s capacity to co-regulate and support children from a window of health, wellbeing, and sustainability requires a space where their own nervous systems, health and wellbeing is prioritised, nurtured, and nourished.