Elizabeth Warner - Transforming Trauma in Children and Adolescents : An Embodied Approach to Somatic Regulation, Trauma Processing, and Attachment-Building

SMART is a ground-breaking new approach to treating traumatized children, based on the combination of keen clinical observation, sensory integration, and a deep understanding of the latest advances in the neuroscience of trauma. A focused, embodied, and engaged sense of self depends on learning to integrate sensory, muscular, emotional, and cognitive input, which is profoundly damaged by early trauma and disrupted attachment. With simple and affordable equipment, SMART creates a sensory space that helps children activate their sensory and physical needs and expressions, which in turn helps them to befriend their internal sensations and manage their actions and interactions. SMART fosters this core foundation for becoming a functioning human being, and thus it can help children to access and activate their rational brains and become full partners in connection, play, learning, and language.

Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD, founder and medical director, emeritus at the Trauma Center, president of the Trauma Research Foundation, professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, and author of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Incredible! SMART is a revolutionary approach that exquisitely weaves together the authors profound clinical wisdom and observations with the science and theory of the leading thinkers and scientists in our field. A must-read for mental health professionals, this book will help move us forward, updating the common, but narrow lens focused only on behavioral and top-down approaches. Keeping regulation and relationships at the heart of the approach, combining what we now know about the embodied brain and the far-too-often neglected sensorimotor system, this book will expand the perspective on and efficacy of the practice of many professionals, and it will support integration for so many families impacted by trauma.

Tina Payne Bryson, LCSW, PhD, best-selling coauthor of The Whole-Brain Child and The Power of Showing Up and founder of TheCenterforConnection.org

Housed within the framework of the tenets of Sensory Integration, the authors have developed a triune intervention model that threads together the aspects of somatic regulation, trauma processing, and attachment-building in order to widen the window of tolerance for the dysregulated behavioral, emotional, and relational challenges faced by children and adolescents with a history of developmental trauma. The Sensory Motor Arousal Regulation Treatment (SMART) intervention model addresses the most fundamental mechanisms of traumatized children in a bottom-up, nonverbal language treatment option that not only prompts kids to askDo I get to play in there!while peeking into his or her therapists office, but more fundamentally, helps them make meaning of their traumatic experiences through the combined therapeutic actions of movement and sensory processes. Thus, while SMART focuses on the body it nonetheless changes a childs state of consciousness. This book is a clinical must-read for therapists who treat traumatized children or adolescents.

Marilyn R. Davillier LCSW, MSSA and Ed Tronick, PhD, founders of the Infant-Parent Mental Health Fellowship, University of Massachusetts Boston

I am so grateful for the commitment of the authors to provide clinicians with an additional, accessible treatment model to help the children in their care heal from the devastating impact of childhood trauma. Peopleespecially childrenexperience overwhelming sensations and feelings that they are unable to put into words. SMARTs emphasis on helping children take effective action using their whole body to better understand and regulate these sensations and feelings is central to healing.

Steve Gross, MSW, chief playmaker and founder of The Life is Good Playmakers

Copyright 2020 by Elizabeth Warner, Anne Westcott, Alexandra Cook, and Heather Finn. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by

North Atlantic Books

Berkeley, California

Cover art arka38/Shutterstock.com

Cover design by Howie Severson

Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Printed in Canada

Transforming Trauma in Children and Adolescents: An Embodied Approach to Somatic Regulation, Trauma Processing, and Attachment-Building is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

MEDICAL DISCLAIMER: The following information is intended for general information purposes only. Individuals should always see their health care provider before administering any suggestions made in this book. Any application of the material set forth in the following pages is at the readers discretion and is his or her sole responsibility.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Warner, Elizabeth, 1951 author. | Westcott, Anne, 1962 author. | Cook, Alexandra, 1967 author. | Finn, Heather, 1978 author. Title: Transforming trauma in children and adolescents : an embodied approach to somatic regulation, trauma processing, and attachment building / Elizabeth Warner, Anne Westcott, Alexandra Cook, Heather Finn. Description: Berkeley, California : North Atlantic Books, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A new somatics and attachment theory treatment protocol for therapists working with children and adolescents who suffer from complex trauma and neglect, using movement and sensation to target the neurological structures that support emotional and behavioral regulationProvided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020003913 (print) | LCCN 2020003914 (ebook) | ISBN 9781623172589 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781623172596 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Psychic trauma in childrenTreatment. | Psychic trauma in adolescenceTreatment. | Child psychotherapy. Classification: LCC RJ506.P66 W37 2020 (print) | LCC RJ506.P66 (ebook) | DDC 618.92/8521dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003913LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003914

This book includes recycled material and material from well-managed forests. North Atlantic Books is committed to the protection of our environment. We print on recycled paper whenever possible and partner with printers who strive to use environmentally responsible practices.

We dedicate this book to the clinicians who invited us into their work. Their curiosity and eagerness to learn a new approach to treatment and their spirit infuse the model today. Most of all, we dedicate this book to the children and families who have journeyed with us in the development of SMART. They have shared their pain and their strength with us, and through their openness, we have all learned and grown.

To the National Child Traumatic Stress Network and the members of the Trauma Center who contributed to its inception and ongoing work to establish a network of people across the United States devoted to the treatment and study of children and adolescents and interpersonal complex trauma. Without the NCTSN, and the knowledge gained, we would not be where we are as a field.