Helping students feel safe is a hallmark of trauma-informed education. For some children, feeling secure in relationships is difficult. Well-intentioned teachers often lack the skills required to communicate and reinforce a sense of trust amongst these students. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Kim Golding about her book, Working with Relational Trauma in Schools.

Trauma, Attachment, and Blocked Trust

Trauma, particularly in early childhood, can have a profound impact on a child’s ability to form healthy attachments and develop trust in others. When children experience trauma, such as abuse, neglect, or significant loss, their sense of safety is compromised. This disruption can lead to “blocked trust,” a term used to describe a child’s inability to form secure, trusting relationships due to past relational harm (Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, 2022). Blocked trust is not simply a behavioral challenge but a deeply ingrained survival mechanism. It manifests as hypervigilance, withdrawal, or aggression, as the child constantly anticipates further harm. For educators and caregivers, understanding blocked trust is essential for helping trauma-affected students.

Children with blocked trust often struggle to build positive connections with adults, which can impede their ability to engage meaningfully in the classroom. As Ayre & Krishnamoorthy (2020) explain, these children may view authority figures with suspicion or hostility, interpreting even neutral or supportive actions as potential threats. This behavior is rooted in their prior experiences, where relationships may have been unpredictable or harmful. Without intervention, these children may find it difficult to develop the emotional regulation and social skills necessary for learning and interacting with others. Educators can play a critical role in helping to restore a sense of safety and trust in these students.

Trauma-informed approaches to education are essential when working with children who have blocked trust. These approaches emphasize the importance of creating safe, consistent environments where children feel emotionally supported. Kim Golding (2021) highlights the need for educators to recognize that challenging behaviors are often expressions of underlying relational trauma, rather than willful disobedience. By responding to these behaviors with empathy and patience, educators can begin to break through the barriers of blocked trust. Trauma-informed strategies, such as providing predictable routines and responding calmly to outbursts, help create an atmosphere of safety, which is the foundation for healing and learning.

Attachment theory further underscores the importance of addressing blocked trust. Children develop attachments based on their early caregiving experiences, and when those experiences are disrupted by trauma, their ability to form secure attachments is compromised. Bombèr et al. (2020) discuss how relational trauma can lead to attachment difficulties, affecting a child’s emotional development and behavior in the classroom. Teachers and caregivers can support these children by adopting practices that promote secure attachments, such as Dyadic Developmental Practice (DDP) and PACE. These approaches help rebuild trust by fostering relationships that are playful, accepting, curious, and empathetic, providing children with the security they need to thrive.

The people who should be there protecting you and comforting you are the ones that are scaring and frightening you. The experience for the child then is a profound sense of mistrust in the parenting they’re experiencing, in the relationships that should be helping them to feel safe in the world. When that experience of trauma is pervasive, starting early in life, it becomes a block to trusting other relationships. Even if your parents are in a better position to keep you safe and protected later, or whether you’re moving to alternative parents or moving out into the world and going into school, all relationships become a threat. That’s what we mean by Blocked Trust. It has a biological substrate, and research shows that this sets in your nervous system. This is not just about learned behavior. It’s more profound than that – a deep sense of ‘I can’t find anyone to trust in the world, so I have to do this myself.’

Dyadic Developmental Practice (DDP) and PACE

Dyadic Developmental Practice (DDP), developed by Daniel Hughes, is a therapeutic approach focused on fostering secure attachments for children who have experienced trauma. The practice utilizes Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, and Empathy (PACE) to build trusting relationships between children and caregivers or educators. PACE encourages adults to approach children with an open and empathetic stance, enabling them to feel safe and valued, which is essential for repairing damaged attachment bonds. Bombèr et al. (2020) emphasize that educators trained in DDP and PACE are better equipped to address challenging behaviors in the classroom by creating an environment where students can explore their emotions without fear of rejection or judgment.

The word Dyadic indicates that we can’t work with children independently and must work with children and their parents within a safe relationship. Children need to work with safe parents to recover the relational experience they need for secure attachment and the trust that comes with that safe relationship. The ‘Dyadic’ in DDP represents the trust in the relational experience that the children didn’t have early in life. The ‘Developmental’ within DDP is based on our understanding of child development. Helping children have a successful developmental pathway fundamental to the model. ‘Psychotherapy’ in DDP is because it is a therapy model with a therapeutic approach. Over time more and more professionals were being trained in the model who weren’t psychologists but worked in Social Work, Residential Care, or Education which has prompted the name change to Dyadic Developmental Practice. There is now Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, Dyadic Developmental Parenting, and Dyadic Developmental Practice to highlight this is greater than just a therapy model. The therapy is still there, but around the therapy is a parenting model, and around that is a systems model that includes education systems. The goal is to bring the same principles into all the environments the children live in, with education and schools being an essential part of that environment.

PACE is the attitude that is central to and underpins the DDP model. It’s an attitude based on what we offer healthy relationship experiences to our young children. Within those healthy relationship experiences in DDP, we offer children an attitude of Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy. We’re interested in their inner world and what’s going on within them, what they’re thinking and feeling. Imagine having a conversation with a baby. We have the words they don’t have yet. All our words are about what’s happening inside them, for example, “you’re feeling happy today”, “Oh, no, no, now you’re upset”.

We talk about what’s going on internally and tend to do that naturally through infancy and toddlerhood. It tends to fade away after that, which is quite sad as we expect children to know by then they’re in a world, and we don’t need to make sense of it anymore. All children, and most adults, like to have our inner world made sense of by others. PACE, then, is an attitude that can apply to all relationships. Dan realized that if we’re going to help children heal from relational traumas, then the PACE attitude is critical. Making sense of a child’s inner world in a playful, accepting, curious and empathic way is essential to helping them feel understood. It’s critical to assist them in learning to trust that others are reliable and can help them in their distress. When a child is distressed, good parenting feels like making the distress go away. To help a child, to help another colleague, another human, we must make them feel understood and heard. People want others to sit with them when it’s uncomfortable. If you were expressing a level of sadness about a recent event to me, you don’t want me to come in and say, “it’ll be all right”, “by next week, this will all be in the past”, or “why are you worrying”?  “What you want is someone to say that sounds tough, you’re having a tough time right now, and I get it, and I think it’s making you very worried.” Then I feel a bit better because you get it, you understand. I feel better because I know someone else understands what I’m going through. That’s at the heart of PACE. The PACE model is sitting compassionately with another person’s experience. Within DDP, we talk a lot about slowing down, which we don’t usually take the time to do. Slowing down looks like “let me listen to you”, “let me hear and know your story.” “Let me share what I’m hearing about your story and allow me to add a little to it with my curiosity into your story.”

Dr. Ayre: From a teacher’s point of view, unless a student is unsafe, we don’t always have to act immediately, which is hard to do. Just because something’s disrupting at the moment for you, you don’t have to jump in straight away and do something to “fix it”. The word therapy instantly brings up thoughts: “I’m not a therapist; I can’t do a therapeutic thing because I don’t have training in it”. You tend to quickly flick the responsibility outside your classroom because that’s not something you know how to do.

Dr. Golding: Teachers have a whole classroom of children that need educating, and it can feel overwhelming, and you ask yourself, “how have I got time to do this”? “You’re asking me to slow down, but I’ve only got so many hours in the day, and I’ve got so many children to attend to”. An important message here is that slowing down is just about saying, “have I understood or do I need to have a bit more understanding here”? That can happen with an acknowledgement to the child, such as saying, “you’re having a tough day, and I’m here”. That doesn’t have to take very long. I knew a primary school teacher who would just put a note on the desk if he noticed a child struggling that said, “I’ve noticed”, “I’m noticing you’re struggling today”. He often wouldn’t even have a conversation with the student. Slowing down doesn’t have to mean hours and hours of sitting and talking to a student.

The Two Hands of Teaching

In trauma-informed education, “The Two Hands of Teaching” refers to balancing both structure and nurture in classroom management. Structure provides consistent boundaries and routines that help children feel secure, while nurture offers emotional support and relational connection. As Ayre & Krishnamoorthy (2020) explain, educators working with trauma-affected children must skillfully juggle these two approaches to help students thrive. The balance between structure and nurture ensures that children feel both safe and cared for, a critical foundation for learning, especially for those with attachment difficulties.

Dan Hughes initially talked about two hands of parenting, and the two hands of teaching is an adaptation of that. The phrase ‘connection before correction’ is one of Dan’s phrases. The connection is the emotional connection with the person, and the importance of ensuring the relationship is there. Correction is about the doing. It isn’t about punishment but learning and teaching. It might be changing something I’m doing because what I’m doing with you is not working; hence the correction is about action. The connection is my emotional relationship with you, which will help the doing happen more successfully. In schools, we have the connection, on the one hand, which includes warmth, empathy, nurturing, and curiosity about your internal experience. There is also the doing part. You hit your peer, which isn’t an acceptable way of managing things. We need to think about how we can make sure that doesn’t happen again and how we can help you repair the relationship with your peer. If we do that alongside the connection, the child will find it much easier to engage with and be less defensive. If students are less defensive, they’re much more likely to learn from the experience where we’re supporting them. We want a child to learn how to manage conflict with peers without hitting them or just going straight to the correction. If we go straight to discipline without connection, the child becomes defensive and starts feeling like they’re bad. Children don’t like feeling like they’re bad, so they may go into shame. An experience of shame takes you away from learning about the world because it becomes very self-focused. Children can’t learn when they’re in a state of shame, they can’t learn academically, and they can’t learn how to resolve the conflict next time. Suppose we can put the second hand in there, connect with the child, and make sense of their experience of what got them so angry. In that case, we can work with the child to resolve the conflict experience. Remember that being angry is a feeling which is neither right nor wrong. We need to help the child understand and then empathize with that experience. Collaborative consequences[1], rather than coercive consequences[2] where the adult imposes a consequence on the child, are more effective in helping the child learn they can help make things better and repair relationships. This will help them learn how to deal with friendships and relationships in the real world as they grow older.

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Practicing in the Moment

Dr. Golding: The model starts with ‘noticing’. Notice if something needs attention, and take immediate action to keep everyone safe. For example, if Billy and Joe are fighting, we must break up the fight for safety. The fast route we usually take then, what’s the consequence here for fighting? Maybe it’s detention after school or at lunchtime. That’s the quick route of managing the children but with no connection. I’ve tried to show what the slow route looks like, which is more effective in emotion regulation. The next part of the process is to notice your reaction and focus on yourself. Ask yourself, how am I doing in this situation? Am I regulated enough to help these kids, or do I need to take care of myself first? If I need to take care of myself, can I hand the children over to someone else because these children need support right now? If I can’t, can I at least take a breath, have compassion for myself, focus on the children, and breathe? I can remind myself this is hard, and it’s okay. I might struggle, but we’ll get through it. Compassion for yourself can allow you to be more open and engaged with the children. Instead of saying, “what the heck is going on here”? You can now calmly say, “hey boys, you’re having a hard time today. Let’s figure out what’s going on here”. Then it’s essential to think about emotion regulation for the children. Are they regulated? If they’re not emotionally regulated, it’s no point in doing anything else because they’re not in a state to receive it. We have to put our attention on regulation first. We might say, “come on, boys, we’re going to go for a walk. I want one of you on either side of me, and while we walk, we’ll think about what’s going on”. Walking and movement is doing something to help the regulation process. We know from occupational therapists that all sorts of things can help children regulate at a sensory and an emotional level.

Once the children are calm, you can say, “Okay, you’ve had a hard time, let’s figure this out”, which is Dan Hughes’ favorite phrase! Another vital part of this process is to not immediately say, “I want you to think about the other person and the impact on them”. We need to start with ourselves first. If I’m talking to Billy, who was going for Joe, it’s no good to be asking Billy what you think Joe’s feeling right now. Billy will go straight into shame and defensiveness, thinking shuts down, and I’ve lost my opportunity to connect with him. Instead, starting with Billy, we ask something like, “what was going on for you”? “I wonder what made you so angry”? During this process, we must remember anger is just a feeling, and it’s neither right nor wrong. It just is. We may say, “help me understand why you got so angry”. When you understand, you give back with empathy, “that was hard for you when that happened”. Now the child is feeling like you get it. He’s not feeling shame now, he’s starting to feel a bit of guilt, and he’s starting to feel some remorse. Billy then thinks, ‘I didn’t want to hurt Joe. He’s my friend, and I don’t know what to do about that, but I feel it. Now Billy’s receptive to some ideas. If we move from shame to guilt, guilt allows remorse and the desire to make amends. So now Billy is in a receptive state. We can think about Joe. “Joe’s upset with you. I don’t want him to be upset with you. I wonder what we can do about that”?

The next part of the sequence is the action part. What are we going to do about this? Here, the collaborative consequence comes in. The adult takes some responsibility here as well. It might be that maybe you guys aren’t ready to play together for half an hour. Perhaps you need a little more supervision or structure to play together? That’s my responsibility as an adult to put that in place, but maybe there’s something you can do that lets Joe know that you are sorry you upset him. Something that lets him know that you want to be friends. I wonder what that could be? And Joe might not be quite ready to hear it yet. Can you be patient with that?

That leads us to the relationship repair part of the sequence, which is the last part, where we help the child repair the relationship. It’s also the adult’s role to think about and ask if there is anything we need to do to repair the relationship. We can reflect and realize that at the beginning, I wasn’t so PACE-ful. I can then acknowledge that I was initially frustrated with you boys, and that’s down to me. I’m glad we managed in the end, though, and this is doing your repair of the relationship. Doing your part of the repair also shows children that repair is an excellent thing to do. We can always reach out and acknowledge we got something wrong. It’s trying to capture PACE and the two hands mentioned earlier.

Teacher Self-Care

Dr. Krishnamoorthy: For teachers to be able to implement this framework, they would need to be feeling safe themselves. Regulated and calm but on some level safe in the environment they’re in as well. Safe in the knowledge that colleagues and administrators have their back when needed. 

Dr. Golding: Whole schools must use a consistent framework, so everyone supports everyone else in a very PACE-ful way. We can then build schools that are safe for everyone, including teachers and other staff. The well-being of the adults is critical to the well-being of the children. If we can’t put well-being for adults in place, we’re not going to get it right for the children. It’s so important we look after the adults here. I’ve also got to look after myself because if we’re not in a safe world, we all go into our defensive nervous systems, which never goes well for anyone.

Dr. Ayre: Commonly, teachers tend to put themselves last. The children always come first, and teachers are not consciously thinking about themselves. Suppose you’ve got a school where everybody consistently supports each other and similarly responds to children. In that case, the mentality of ‘this child is your problem because he’s in your classroom’ reduces. Everybody then takes on some responsibility for helping all students. It helps everybody to say we need great teachers with great well-being to be able to help each other and to help our students. Therefore, my priority as your colleague is ensuring you’re okay.

Dr. Golding: The common phrase ‘you put your oxygen mask on first, I can only support you if I look after myself’ is relevant here. A story that helps define the importance of this is of the father in the desert. I don’t know the story’s author, but it’s where a father and a son are walking in the desert, and they’re lost. They can’t find their way out. They’ve got one bottle of water between them, and the son is getting thirsty because it’s scorching, and the son says to his Dad, “Daddy, can I have some water? I’m thirsty”. The father says, “I’m so sorry, my lad, I’m going to drink the water”. The son says, “but Daddy, that’s not fair. I’m thirsty. Why are you drinking the water when it’s like this”? The father says, “If I drink the water, I’ll keep myself going, and I can find a way to get us out of this desert. If I give you the water, I won’t be able to do that”. That story shows us fundamental reasons why we take care of ourselves first.

Social Emotional Schools

Dr. Golding: There’s a school that I’ve supported in England called ‘Nurture Learning’. It’s a very small school, and it’s for children who are failing in mainstream schools because of social-emotional difficulties. The school has a wonderful group of teachers who offer the children a PACE-ful experience. What we see are children who settle and flourish in school. There was once a young girl who was 14 or 15 when she came into that school, and she was having a tough time. She had a complicated upbringing with her parents. She had failed in mainstream school, and her learning was compromised. She was significantly underachieving. What impressed me was how the staff could focus on her social and emotional support and how they didn’t get preoccupied thinking they had to teach this girl academics. They knew this child wasn’t in a place to learn right now. They felt able to give her the time and space she needed to feel safe in the school and to build relationships around her to improve her emotional well-being. Only after that were they able to see her start to flourish and move towards learning. She achieved the qualifications and all the things we wanted to put out at school. Without the initial focus on safety and her social-emotional well-being, she would never have achieved that learning.

There’s a lot of preoccupation in schools, particularly for adolescents who need to get their Year 12 certificates or qualifications, on getting them to catch up if they’ve had disrupted learning. There’s an ongoing debate with the government, who are pushing to use some of the school holidays to help these kids catch up academically. These kids are frightened. They’re coming back to school after being confined to home. They have been told there’s something perilously dangerous in the world, and now we’re saying go to school and catch up with your learning. We’re missing some steps here. We need social-emotional safety for our adolescence just as much as for our younger children. We need to help them integrate back into schools and their peer groups. If we attend to their social and emotional needs, they’ll catch up because they learn when they’re in the right emotional state. Humans have a thirst for learning and will achieve what they need to succeed. That isn’t always understood.

Dr. Krishnamoorthy: When we think about big groups of people, we don’t often consider their social-emotional safety. People’s mental health was not well regarded in the COVID-19 pandemic response. Interestingly, the social-emotional needs of people are never a key feature of how things are managed in society.

Dr. Golding: And that’s understandable, the crisis came, and we had to deal with it quickly. Like in my model, the first thing you must do is attend to the immediate danger. There is a knock-on effect, though. For example, we know that adolescent suicides are increasing now, and mental health everywhere has been compromised. As we ease out of this pandemic, we must attend to this. It can be easy to say, “everything’s normal again”, “get the kids back into school, get them caught up on their learning, and they will be fine”. It’s not as easy as this. These kids have been through some awful trauma through this pandemic, whether it’s touched them personally or whether they just watched it on the news and heard about it. We’ve all been affected by the trauma of this and some children in a very, very personal way. They’ve lost parents or family members, and this is an excellent example of working with massive trauma. We’re going to help these children return to school, but we’ve got to do it safely, in an emotionally healthy way.

Chapter Summary

• Trauma can occur from influences outside of the family and from within family relationships.
• Blocked trust develops out of pervasive trauma early in life, which creates a block to trusting other relationships.
• PACE principles help promote the experience of relational safety between adults and children.
• Collaborative consequences are effective in helping a child learn they can make things better and repair relationships.
• If students are understood and have a relationship with teachers, their nervous system will calm, and this will help them feel safe at school. Then they can learn academics.
• The well-being of teachers is crucial to the well-being of children. Teachers need to feel supported and safe to implement relational frameworks with students.

REFERENCES

Ayre, K., & Krishnamoorthy, G. (2020). Trauma informed behaviour support: A practical guide to developing resilient learners. University of Southern Queensland. https://usq.pressbooks.pub/traumainformedpractice/

Ayre, K. & Krishnamoorthy, G. (Hosts). (2021, April 11). Educating students with blocked trust with Dr. Kim Golding [Audio podcast episode]. In Trauma Informed Education. SoundCloud. https://soundcloud.com/trauma-informed-education/educating-students-with-blocked-trust-with-dr-kim-golding?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Bombèr, L. M., Golding, K., & Phillips, S. (2020). Working with relational trauma in schools: An educator’s guide to using Dyadic Developmental practice. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Cardiff and Vale University Health Board. (2022). Blocked trust. https://cavuhb.nhs.wales/files/resilience-project/parent-group-resources/12-blocked-trust-parents-english-pdf/

Golding, K. (2015). Parenting in the moment: Connection first before responding to behaviour. https://kimsgolding.co.uk/backend/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Parenting-in-the-moment.pdf

RSA Shorts. (2014). Brené Brown on empathy. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw

Scottish Attachment in Action. (2018, September 27). A Day with Dan – Conference themes. [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/292109115?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&owner=66040245