SENSORY ATTACHMENT INTERVENTION. A day with Éadaoin Bhreathnach.

"Excellent day... pulling together lots of views from neuroscience, OT, Education"
"I really enjoyed watching the video, very helpful learning and memorable"
"Fantastic day - really informative and filled in lots of gaps... everyone should learn this stuff!"

(previous delegates, SAI conference with Éadaoin)

Description

Occupational Therapist and Attachment Counsellor, originator of Sensory Attachment Intervention, Éadaoin runs her own private clinic in sensory-attachment intervention in Ireland. She provides training and sensory attachment assessments for many children with both sensory and attachment issues.

What is Sensory Attachment Intervention?

Sensory Attachment Intervention (SAI) is an innovative neuro-behavioural approach for the treatment of troubled children, particularly effective with those who have suffered abuse or neglect. Many troubled children have an underlying sensory processing disorder. This means that they cannot organise incoming sensory information. They find it difficult to process and act upon information received through the senses, so they often experience sensory overload and feel overwhelmed. This can lead to all manner of problems with learning coupled with anxiety, depression or other mental health issues and difficult behaviour, often misinterpreted as ‘just being naughty’. For others their vestibular sensory system is not working well (the part of us that knows where we are in space) so they are clumsy or knock into things, again often misinterpreted as bad behaviour. Additionally, with some traumatised children, their sensory systems have become so sensitised to the possibility of danger they become ‘sensory defensive', finding certain sounds, lights, physical touch, smells, foods, and even certain temperatures very difficult. Moreover particular sensations can reactivate their trauma response.

About the day

This training day is an introduction to Sensory Attachment Intervention. Éadaoin will explore how Sensory Attachment Intervention recognises the need to address sensory issues alongside attachment issues, an extremely powerful combination working with body, brain and mind. Through moving case material she will explain how children and teenagers can be helped to establish both emotional regulation and regulation of bodily arousal states. Éadaoin will demonstrate exactly how SAI provides enriched sensory and attachment experiences for troubled children and teenagers and why it is so effective.

Delegates will also learn about differentiating between sensory and attachment-based behaviours, and about adapting sensory processing interventions for attachment-trauma, with interventions specific to the emotionally avoidant child and the emotionally reactive child. She will also provide a neuro-behavioural analysis of how sensory processing difficulties can manifest in particular behaviour problems. Finally, she will address food, how it triggers certain emotion neurochemicals, and the use of a specific sensory-attachment diet of food and play to match the needs of individual children

Benefits from attending this conference

• Practical advice will be given on matching regulating activities to the child’s presenting pattern
• Understand how to recognise the sensory-attachment needs of troubled children and teenagers
• Video footage will include case examples of treating sensory processing disorder and developmental trauma
• Learn to identify whether behaviour is sensory or attachment based
• Learn how to emotionally regulate and physically regulate children with sensory and attachment needs in ways that mean they are no longer overwhelmed by sensation, emotion and everyday experiences
• Learn how to set up a therapeutic sensory attachment setting (including vital play equipment)
• Learn how parents can provide an enriched regulating environment in the home
• Learn about the play and diet interventions that provide regulation for children and teenagers with sensory processing problems
• Learn how to make SAI assessments
• Learn how to facilitate parent child co-regulation
• Understand therapeutic change through sensory processing with the use of patterned, repetitive activation of the neural systems (Perry 2009)
• Learn about the micro-analysis of parent-child engagement patterns 

 More about Éadaoin Bhreathnach and Sensory Attachment Intervention