Dan and Kim published the ‘Healing Relational Trauma Workbook’ in 2024. This provides DDP therapists and practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, Parenting, and Practice (DDP). Within the Workbook, there is an important emphasis on reflection and self-understanding by the therapist. In this presentation we will explore how individual differences, often influenced by past relational and attachment experience, can impact on the therapist’s practice of DDP. Self-understanding can help the therapist to develop their practice, understanding their own unique strengths and challenges, so that they can ‘sit with the uncomfortable’ able to offer co-regulation and co-creation of affective-reflective narratives with the children and families they are working with.

Paul Denniston leads participants through carefully crafted chair-based easy Grief Yoga® practices that support the processing of healing from the pain of all kinds of heartbreak, trauma and loss through movement. He discusses ways that grief can become stuck in the body and will demonstrate how movement, breath and sound can help clients release accumulated emotions to navigate the complex territory of grief whilst strengthening their capacity for authentic connection with self and others. Learning Objectives: 1. Demonstrate specific movement practices that help clients process grief and strengthen their resilience 2. Apply understanding of embodied grief work to support clients in maintaining and deepening relationships while honoring their losses 3. Explore and embody how play can help process grief and trauma

In this Keynote, adults offer their lived experience of child sexual abuse to emphasise the findings of Australian Childhood Foundation’s survey report, which heard from hundreds of survivors about the topics adults must understand in order to prevent further abuse. The survivors you will hear from are a part of our ongoing work to include mandatory child abuse prevention education in Australia’s Working With Children Check.