Building New Pathways:

Building New Pathways:

Supporting Adults to Repair from Early Life Trauma

Training overview:

✔️ Understand the impact of trauma on adult brain development, attachment patterns, and nervous system functioning using the Building New Pathways framework

✔️ Learn the fundamentals of Polyvagal Theory and explore how to apply practical regulation strategies to support safety and stability in therapeutic, relational, and home environments.

✔️ Explore common adult presentations that reflect compromised neurodevelopment, including anxiety, dissociation, shutdown, hypervigilance, and emotional dysregulation.

✔️ Work effectively with dissociation and dorsal vagal presentations, including chronic shutdown, emotional numbing, and internal disconnection—understanding them as adaptive responses to overwhelm rather than resistance.

✔️ Use a needs-based approach to understand adult behaviour, recognising that maladaptive patterns are often attempts to meet unmet relational, sensory, or regulatory needs.

✔️ Develop a new lens for understanding adult behaviour patterns through the Needs Map, applying a trauma-informed and neurobiological perspective to assess symptoms and guide responses.

✔️ Review real-world case studies and analyse how stress responses, attachment adaptations, and dysregulation present in adult populations.

✔️ Engage in guided practicum exercises throughout the training to practice nervous system-informed responses, attuned listening, and co-regulation strategies in a safe, supervised environment.

✔️ Explore advanced strategies to create safe therapeutic relationships with adults who have experienced chronic trauma, disrupted attachment, or relational rupture.

✔️ Learn how to assess and map trauma-based symptoms using the Pathways framework to track therapeutic progress and tailor treatment planning.

✔️ Understand and work with autonomic nervous system presentations, including sympathetic (hyperaroused) and dorsal vagal (shutdown) dominance, and their implications for intervention and rapport-building.

✔️ Integrate evidence-based interventions such as HRV training, neurofeedback, and EMDR within the Pathways framework, ensuring alignment with a client’s current level of developmental and nervous system functioning.

✔️ Apply neuroscience-informed strategies for emotional regulation, behavioural stabilisation, and trauma recovery in adult clinical work.

✔️ Develop therapeutic responses to common trauma-related difficulties in adults such as emotional volatility, chronic disconnection, self-sabotaging behaviours, sleep dysregulation, and relational avoidance.

✔️ Explore the use of sensory, somatic, and rhythm-based interventions with adult clients to support regulation and integration, especially where verbal therapies have been limited.

✔️ Review and analyse case studies to deepen clinical understanding of trauma responses and track changes across the Pathways domains.

✔️ Learn how to adapt and apply the Pathways model across different adult contexts – including therapy, social work, mental health settings and workplace settings