From 2020 to 2023 Emerging Minds National Workforce Center for Children’s Mental Health worked intensively with sixteen practitioners across Australia to better understand their therapeutic practices with children who experience trauma and their strategies for supporting mental health. These practitioners worked in both specialist trauma and generalist services and described the multiple presenting issues affecting the children who visited them and competing imperatives for their work. This presentation describes the trauma informed practices and policies that have been designed by these therapists to effectively meet the needs of children and families.

As part of work with the sixteen practitioners, key themes and strategies emerged. These themes included practitioner efforts to understand the context of children’s stories, helping them to connect with their resilience in the wake of trauma, and helping them to create meaning of the actions they took in keeping themselves or others safe. Rather than only diagnosing and correcting the effects of trauma on the child’s body and brain, the therapists described their work in helping children to describe their responses to experiences of trauma. This led to new understandings and reinterpretations of past experiences for many of the children and young people in their services.

This presentation examines therapy that recruits children as co-researchers in the meaning-making of their life’s experiences, including both the effects and their responses to experiences of trauma. In this way, therapists are accountable to a fascination with what is not yet known, rather than to the reproduction of dominant discourses of correction. It provides specific and practical therapeutic examples from different services and professionals across in Australia in accordance with the practice themes that we identified. The presentation will provide case examples and practices gleaned from practitioners as part of an Emerging Minds paper published in The Journal of Systemic Therapies.