Buy & Download
Buy & Download
Places of Safety – Alix Hearn
£FREE
Duration:
1 Hour
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.
What does it really mean to be a secure base for someone?
Safety isn’t simply about creating a calm therapy room. It’s something that can be experienced relationally — through consistency, emotional availability, co-regulation, repair and the experience of being understood.
Our CPCAB Level 5 Diploma in Attachment-Based Psychotherapy helps therapists take attachment theory into clinical practice and become more curious about what behaviour may be communicating.
You’ll explore attachment strategies, trauma and the nervous system, mentalising, rupture and repair, and the therapeutic relationship — while considering the wider relationships, experiences and contexts that shape a person’s sense of safety.
Because when we stop asking “What’s wrong with this behaviour?” and start wondering “What might this behaviour be telling us?”, our understanding of the person can change.