Children and Complex Trauma: A Roadmap for Healing and Recovery

If you're a foster or adoptive parent, family caregiver, social worker, or professional supporting children who have experienced trauma, you may have felt confused and overwhelmed at some point. It may seem like typical parenting and strategies just don't work.

Children from difficult life situations can experience bewildering emotional and behavioural challenges. Often current approaches to help these kids are fragmented and ineffective. However, when we understand how trauma can affect the developing brain and adopt strategies that are complex trauma focused, we can turn these kids' lives around.

Children and Complex Trauma: A Roadmap for Healing and Recovery presents simple, practical, and proven strategies - based around the Complex Care and Intervention Program. This approach, fine-tuned in well over 300 challenging cases, and supported by compelling outcome data, will help you answer questions like:

- Why does my child act like this?
- What do I need to understand about how these children's brains work?
- How can I help a child heal from past traumatic experiences?
- What proven strategies can help a child manage their big emotions?

There is a powerful message of hope in these pages and the case stories will forever transform how you understand and support children. It's also a roadmap for necessary changes in practices and policies across our systems so that we can help children heal from their pasts.

Chuck Geddes. Ph.D. is a psychologist who has worked in the fields of Child and Youth Mental Health and Child Welfare for the past twenty-five years. He has worked at various levels in these systems and in many locations around British Columbia, from big cities to small towns and First Nations reserves. This broad experience gives him a unique perspective on what is necessary to help kids heal and recover. Dr. Geddes lives with his wife, his adult son, and his parents in Chilliwack, British Columbia, surrounded by farmland and nestled among beautiful mountains and rivers.