Hypervigilance, Dissociation, ADHD & Conduct Disorders

Building knowledge, confidence, and compassionate care skills for carers and foster parents.

Childhood trauma and neurodevelopmental conditions like ADHD fundamentally shape how a young person’s brain, body, and nervous system develop. Behaviours that appear defiant, withdrawn, or chaotic are intelligent survival adaptations to early adversity and executive function deficits.

This practical professional development course equips carers and foster parents with the neuroscience, self-regulation techniques, and real-world tools needed to move from reactive discipline to trauma-informed, brain-based care.

Key Learning Highlights

• The Neuroscience of Childhood Trauma: Understand how early neglect, abuse, and instability reprioritise brain development toward survival, driving fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses.
• Coping Adaptations: Recognise how hypervigilance (constant threat scanning) and dissociation (mental disconnection) manifest in daily home and school life.
• The Window of Tolerance: Master Dr Dan Siegel’s model to identify hyperarousal (panic/rage) and hypoarousal (shutdown/numbness), learning how to widen a young person’s emotional capacity over time.
• Co-Regulation as a Tool: Utilise your own calm nervous system through tone of voice, body language, and physical presence to soothe dysregulated young people and build neural pathways for independent self-regulation.
• ADHD & Executive Function: Deconstruct ADHD presentations (inattentive, hyperactive, combined), untangle the overlap between trauma responses and ADHD, and support “time blindness” and working memory challenges.
• Connection Before Correction: Apply positive, non-punitive behaviour management strategies, visual supports, and post-crisis recovery conversations.
• Body-Based & Resilience Practices: Implement accessible mindfulness, box breathing, sensory grounding, and bodywork approaches to bypass verbal resistance and process somatic trauma.
• Navigating Transitions: Prepare young people for daily routine shifts and major life changes (moving placements, leaving care, or ending therapeutic relationships).

Why Choose This Course?

This course bridges complex psychological theory with immediate, real-world application. It will support you in transforming your daily practice and becoming the steady, regulating anchor a young person needs to heal and thrive.

Who Should Attend: Foster Carers, Kinship Carers, Prospective Adopters, Residential Care Staff, and Social Care Support Professionals.