Places of Safety – Alix Hearn

£FREE

This course explores how practitioners can understand and create “places of safety” for children, young people, families, clients and supervisees in an increasingly unsafe and anxious world.

It focuses on safety as something relational, embodied and contextual rather than simply physical. Key themes include attachment within wider ecological systems, co-regulation, play, belonging, repair after rupture, emotional availability, and the importance of understanding behaviour as meaningful communication rather than pathology. The course also invites practitioners to think critically about decolonising child mental health, giving voice to silenced or marginalised experiences, and recognising how culture, history, family systems, environment and power shape people’s sense of safety.

A central takeaway is that children and young people rarely struggle in isolation. Practitioners are encouraged to ask what sits behind behaviour, how adults can offer a secure base, and how therapeutic or supervisory relationships can become spaces where difficult feelings are survived, repaired and held — but not carried alone.