Making Sense of Aggression
Aggression problems are deeply rooted in instinct and emotion and are therefore resistant to conventional discipline practices. Dr. Neufeld uncovers these roots and outlines steps to addressing them. His rich professional experience with aggressive children and violent youth informs this refreshing approach to an age-old problem. The principles apply to children of all ages and all settings: home, school, and treatment.
Power to Parent - The Vital Connection
The key to making sense of a child is to view them first and foremost through the lens of attachment. The secret to being naturally empowered as a parent lies in children, including adolescents, being in right relationship to their parents. The more difficult the child or the problems, the more this is true. It is this very relationship that is being eroded by cultural chaos, by competing attachments to peers, and by parenting practices that interfere with the development of attachment. To compensate for the loss of cultural wisdom, we must become conscious of attachment and then parent with attachment in mind. This is the objective of this course. The only salvation for parenting today that is truly natural and intuitive is to know how best to work at attachment and let attachment do its best work for us.
The Resilience Riddle - making sense of stress, trauma and recovery
One of the most challenging and crucial questions of our time is why some bounce back from adversity, seemingly unscathed, while others fall apart and become emotionally distraught and dysfunctional. Resilience is probably the most important topic of our time. It holds the answers to emotional health and well-being, mental illness, healing and recovery, prevention, addiction, and much more. Resilience is not only the best overall prevention but also the best focus for intervention. Resilience is about ourselves and those we are responsible for.
In this course, we look at where resilience comes from and how we are to make sense of it. We use fresh understandings of emotion to uncover the roots of resilience in relationship, feelings, play, and rest. These pivotal factors are too often eclipsed by the current prevailing focus on symptoms, syndromes, and stress, as well as problem behaviour and dysfunction. The incredible story of emotional health and well-being is not about what has happened to us but rather about what hasn’t happened within us.
Speaking, Presentations and Workshops
I provide presentations and consulting to help parents and professionals make sense of the children and adolescents in their care. Based on the work of Dr. Gordon Neufeld, intervention is aimed at understanding the roots of a problem rather than simply throwing consequences at symptoms. Emphasis is placed on understanding children from the inside out, and creating attachment friendly, developmentally sound practices to support change.
If you are a teacher or a helping professional involved with children (school counsellor, pediatrician, social worker, child psychiatrist, psychologist, etc.) and would like to understand how the Neufeld approach can be applied in your context, please contact me.
Enjoy a Custom Presentation or Workshop
Do you have a specific interest or training need for your child and youth facility or school? I am happy to work with you to design a custom training to best meet your professional development and continuing education needs. Contact me here or at heartmattersconsulting@pm.me to explore the options for your team.
Or, choose from one of my established trainings for helping professionals below:
Teaching doesn’t always result in learning and this discrepancy seems to be widening. This, despite the fact that students have never been smarter, teachers have never been better trained, our curriculum has never been more honed, and our technology has never been so advanced. According to Dr. Neufeld, the teachability factor is the most overlooked, least understood and potentially the most promising of the factors in the learning equation. Current educational methods and curriculum assume teachability, setting teachers up for considerable frustration when this assumption is not realized.
A growing number of children and youth are presenting as demanding, prescriptive, bossy and controlling. A disturbing number of these alpha children are turning into bullies as well. Alpha children can be challenging to manage and, by their nature, are more likely to present with troubling behaviour. This is making the child-adult dance much more difficult than it used to be or needs to be, despite the plethora of advice-giving and strategies available today.
Once we understand how bullies are made, our attempts to unmake them can be truly effective and long-lasting. Most prevailing approaches to this problem assume that bullying is either learned behaviour or the result of failure to acquire social skills. In contrast, Dr. Neufeld dissects the bully syndrome to reveal its deep instinctive roots in the dynamics of attachment and vulnerability.
Discipline is one of the biggest challenges faced by parents and educators. We all want good behaviour from our children, but as a culture we have fallen to instant fixes and one minute answers without weighing the costs on our child's well-being. When the challenge is to impose order on behaviour without putting in jeopardy healthy attachment and development, many are at a loss of how to proceed. This course equips parents and teachers with a solid methodology that is not only much more effective but also much less risky than the usual fare. It not only answers the questions of what to do when problems arise but does so without sacrificing a child's emotional health and sense of security for short-term gains in behaviour and performance.
Neufeld Intensive I: Making Sense of Kids
Not everyone grows up as they get older. The construct of psychological immaturity is not new, but only recently has developmental science advanced to the point where the idea of developmental arrest can be spelled out and employed as a powerful explanatory tool for problems in learning and behaving. Once kids are stuck, the usual ways of dealing with behaviour - including sanctions, consequences, and time-outs - actually make things worse. This flagship course, organized around the constructs of maturation and stuckness, provides a grounding in the conceptual foundations of Dr. Neufeld's formulation of the attachment-based developmental approach.
Neufeld Intensive II: The Separation Complex
Most problem behaviour is rooted in instinct and emotion and is therefore unresponsive to conventional forms of discipline or behaviour management. Building on the foundations of the Intensive I, this course sheds light upon the profound impact of separation on a child's personality and behavior, with special attention given to the problems of aggression, resistance, oppositionality, bullying, distractability, impulsiveness, anxiety, alarm problems, alpha problems, attachment problems, and more. When the developmental antecedents are understood, the path to effective intervention becomes clear.
The prerequisite for this course is Neufeld Intensive I: Making Sense of Kids.
