Never Look Away: Acting with Clarity and Courage for Traumatized Children

The Trauma Systems Therapy Training Center has produced a nine-module, animated video series and an accompanying curriculum based on concepts and tools from Trauma Systems Therapy (TST) that covers essential aspects of trauma-informed care (such as assessment, case formulation, treatment planning, treatment engagement, advocacy, focused intervention).

The curriculum is entitled Never Look Away because this phrase encapsulates the central value used in TST for guiding the work with traumatized children and families. The Never Look Away series helps those responsible for caring for traumatized children to understand the child’s perspective and utilize this understanding to “never look away” from what is needed to help them. This pedagogy of this video series and curriculum applies case method techniques that center on two characters who have experienced traumatic events and who have significant problems related to their sense of safety and security in their worlds.

Participants engage in two modules a week online at their own pacing, then join our trainers virtually for a 1-hour live Zoom call once a week to discuss the module content and how it relates to their work with traumatized children.

Each video module has a theme, described here:

• Never Look Away: The bedrock value for the work that must be conducted to care for traumatized children called Never Look Away is introduced. This imperative calls on those responsible to help traumatized children to understand what the child needs, and to be unwavering in the effort to provide it.

• Surviving: The central problem of traumatic stress is survival. This module introduces viewers to these survival systems and to their impact on traumatized children.

• Looking: The work to help traumatized children involves investigation, the process of looking for clues to understand the conditions under which a child shifts to a survival state. This module describes how to look for these clues.

• Remembering: By understanding how extreme reactions in the present can be related to past experiences of trauma, this module helps viewers understand how a traumatized child experiences their world.

• Caring: This module reviews the importance of interpersonal relationships in the child’s life, and the quality of the child’s attachments, for building hope and recovery.

• Doing: In this module, we describe how interventions are selected and implemented, based on the understanding that has been gained.

• Protecting: Sometimes the care that must be provided is done in the context of high risk: the child may be at risk to harm themself—or others—due to the child’s own impulses. This module details how the principles of intervention are implemented in contexts of high risk.

• Partnering: This module details the process of determining the partnerships that are needed, the way in which partnerships can be strengthened, and actions to take if the individuals needed in partnership are unwilling or unable to participate as partners.

• Bearing: The work required to help traumatized children is hard and requires an understanding of the personal toll of the work and the use of processes that can help to manage such toll. This module is designed to help those who care for traumatized children to take care of themselves.

To view a video trailer produced for this program, click here: Never Look Away Trailer