“Maintaining and Ethical Inner Balance:

The Unfinished Business of Our Childhoods: Healing the Helping Professional's Childhood Trauma and Attachment Wounds"

Presented by Adam McCormick, Ph.D., MSSW, BSW, Associate Professor of Social Work, St. Edward's University

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This presentation will examine the ways in which the initial imprints of our earliest attachment and trauma wounds can manifest in our work and relationships as we help to heal the trauma wounds of others. In his seminal work, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk, notes that "scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening." This presentation will give specific attention to the unique ways that helpers will often gravitate toward the most familiar and recognizable aspects of their childhoods. Participants will explore the ways in which qualities such as selflessness, people-pleasing, workaholicism, never saying, "no" and others that are thought of as reflections of our greatest strengths are often reflections of a disconnection from our authentic selves.
 

This workshop will present a model for healing that seeks to help participants to identify the trauma and attachment adaptations they developed in childhood and why they were necessary, honor those adaptations for what they did for us, explore how those adaptations show up in our current work and relationships, and learn to let go of those that have worn out their welcome or no longer needed and reconnect with the parts of their authentic selves that they had to disconnect from as children.

Objectives: 
1. Examine the survival nature of early childhood attachment and trauma wounds and the lasting imprints that they leave in the relationships and work of helping professionals.

2. Explore the ways in which helping professionals often recreate the most familiar and recognizable dynamic of their childhood by recreating their attachment and trauma adaptations in their work.

3. Consider the ways that helping professions (often unknowingly and unintentionally) reinforce many of the most unhealthy and toxic dynamics of childhood.

4. Explore strategies for healing that seeks to help participants reconnect with those parts of their authentic self that they disconnected from in an effort to attach and/or survive as children.

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Any accommodation requests or check/PO they can contact Bianca Castrejon (bcastrejon3@utep.edu)