Enhanced Webinar: Multiple Disadvantage – Understanding and Responding to Trauma Responses

Please note that this is a paid webinar.

How can a deeper understanding of trauma help you make better decisions about what you are seeing — and how to respond?

This enhanced webinar moves beyond recognising trauma responses to explore how a deeper understanding of trauma can inform everyday professional practice.

It can be attended as a standalone session or as a natural next step following our free introductory webinar on multiple disadvantage and trauma responses.

Led by Sue Penna, the session will help participants interpret behaviours and stress responses through a trauma-informed lens, challenge potentially harmful assumptions and develop practical approaches to supporting regulation, safety and recovery.

The science of trauma — including chronic stress, attachment, sensory memory and Polyvagal Theory — will be explored in the context of what it means for practice: how people may respond under threat, what practitioners can do differently, and where the boundaries lie between trauma-informed support and specialist therapeutic intervention.

In this session, we’ll explore:

• What we mean by Multiple Disadvantage and its scale, drawing on national mapping of overlapping disadvantage
• The biological basis of trauma, including the ACE Study, the difference between adversity and trauma, and developmental trauma
• Epigenetics and intergenerational trauma, including research with survivor and descendant populations
• The brain’s threat-response system and how chronic stress can affect executive functioning
• Trauma responses including fight, flight, freeze, fawn and flop, and the body’s survival loop
• Attachment and sensory development, including how early sensory memory can trigger flashbacks
• Polyvagal Theory, the autonomic nervous system and the hierarchy of threat responses
• Approaches to regulation, including restoring safety, building bodily awareness and supporting a gradual return to calm
• How labels such as “non-compliant” or “attention seeking” can be challenged and reframed around trauma and unmet need
• Common misconceptions about trauma-informed practice
• Applying the six principles of Safety, Trustworthiness, Choice, Collaboration, Cultural Responsiveness and Empowerment both organisationally and in direct work with clients
• The role of trauma stabilisation as the first stage of trauma-focused work, before trauma processing begins

What will you take away?

By the end of the webinar, attendees will have:

• A practical working model of the nervous system, using Polyvagal Theory to better understand their own and others’ stress responses
• A clearer understanding of what trauma-informed practice is — and what it is not
• A practical framework for applying the six trauma-informed principles both within organisations and in client-facing work
• Tools for reframing the question from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What’s happened, and how can we work safely and fairly?”
• Greater confidence that trauma-informed practice is relational rather than clinical, and does not require practitioners to be therapists
• An understanding of trauma stabilisation and when specialist support may be needed
• Greater awareness of self-care when working with sensitive and emotionally demanding material

Who is this webinar for?

This webinar is relevant to professionals working with people who experience trauma and multiple disadvantage, from frontline practitioners to senior leaders across children’s services, domestic abuse services, social care, policing, housing, health, the voluntary sector and more.

About your host

Sue Penna MSc, Dip Couns, Dip COT, FRSA is Founder and CEO of Rock Pool CIC and has over 30 years’ experience working with people affected by psychological trauma. A clinician, trainer and supervisor, Sue is widely recognised for her expertise in trauma-informed practice, domestic abuse and multiple disadvantage.