Running time 1hr 11mins mins

“In every nursery there are ghosts. There are visitors from the unremembered past of the parents. The intruders from the parental past break through, and the parent and child find themselves re-enacting a moment or a scene from another time with another set of characters (Fraiberg, et al., 1975 Ghosts in the Nursery).

Through powerful case material and evidence-based research, this webinar explores how a parent’s unprocessed painful life experience can become a major contributory factor in their child/teenager suffering from mental health problems. The webinar will also explore how transfer of parental chronic unrelieved stress can impact on how genes are expressed in their child’s brain (known as epigenetics). This means that the child is very vulnerable to suffering from anxiety and depression, now or in later life. 

But the webinar is not about blaming parents, rather it aims to give both professionals and parents a real insight into how children can be affected by their parent/s’ unprocessed trauma and then how to prevent this from happening. So, the webinar will focus on the research on trauma reflective functioning, namely that when parents reflect on, feel and process what’s happened to them with an emotionally available adult/counsellor/ therapist it is protective against intergenerational transmission of what they suffered to their own children. Actual parent–child relationships will be referred to throughout, so this webinar will move hearts as well as minds.