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ACEs Recovery Toolkit – Week Six and Seven

Children and Young People Domestic Abuse Recovery Toolkit

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4th June 2018

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Laura Harris

Junk Sculpts with Pauline, Annie and Alice

My blog is a little different this week…as I’m combining two sessions into one.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to be there to facilitate Week 6, but I left delivering in the capable hands of my wonder co-facilitator.  My co-facilitator is toolkit trained, so is aware of the Rock Pool model, and has a good awareness of ACEs and Trauma-Informed practice.

If you find yourself in this situation, it’s OK; don’t panic! Just make sure your co-facilitator is well-rehearsed and able to deliver the session, has basic ACE Awareness, and you complete a full debrief with them on your return. It’s always useful to make sure you have a third person on standby, to make sure there is two people in the session every week.

Following my debrief with my colleague, she stated that Week 6 was really interesting.

In Week 6, parents are asked to complete ‘Junk Sculpts’ to try and identify the support networks they have around them, and start looking at connections and relationships with family, friends and professionals, and ways in which these can be strengthened to improve their resilience.

My colleague told me that one parent in particular found this extremely difficult. Her children had been removed from her care, with only weekly contact for a couple of hours. She has no relationship with her family, no friends and only the regular support of her social worker and the ACEs programme.

The parent became quite upset following the junk sculpt, as the activity allowed to her visually represent the people she felt she trusted, had confidence in, and who she could turn to for support, and in her case, this was very few.

However, following conversation in the room, she started to add in people she had met in group and had developed relationships with, we looked at agencies that she could get support from, and her junk sculpt grew (along with her smile).

Again, another positive week for these parents.

Week 7 focused on Anger, and how we can manage it more effectively.

The key message in Week 7, is supporting parents to accept that anger is just another one of our emotions, but we need to be able to adopt behaviours to express our anger appropriately.

Parents were given three words; ‘Aggressive’ ‘Passive’ and ‘Assertive’ and asked to describe what behaviours went with these words.

Parents identified Aggressive to be ‘hot-headed’, ‘raging’ ‘steaming and hopping mad’, and gave physical feelings to be shaky, stomach turning and feeling sick.

Passive was thought to be ‘laid back’, ‘chilled out’ and ‘passed caring.’

Parents gave character names to the behaviour types:

Passive Pauline, Aggressive Annie and Assertive Alice.

It helped them to visualise what these behaviours might look like in a person.

One parent stated that she felt she was a ‘Passive Pauline’ as she didn’t let things bother her, but this parent had recently left an abusive relationship, and was able to make the connection that she had to learn to become ‘passive’ to survive.

We spent a good deal of time focusing on assertive behaviour, and making the connection between confidence, good self-esteem and resilience.

We spoke about the fact that it’s OK to feel angry, given the ACEs that they have experienced, and how children who act impulsively and aggressively, are probably doing so because of their ACEs.

Now that parents had an awareness that feelings impact behaviour, and we have started to link ACEs to those feelings and behaviour, we can be certain that ACEs can account for our behaviour, and use the knowledge we have around resilience from Weeks 5 and 6 to start being able to deal with our anger more effectively, and support our children to do so, too!

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