Working with Children and Youth Who are High-Risk, Marginalized and Engage in Self-Harming | On Demand

ON-DEMAND: Recorded footage & course content (certificate, videos, quiz) will be available until September 1, 2026. Extensions cannot be granted under any circumstances.

For anyone who know that “safety contracts” don’t work and want to know what does. Self-harm among youth isn’t rising because young people are more fragile. It’s rising because the conditions they’re navigating create psychological states where harming one’s own body makes functional sense. This intensive 6-hour workshop is designed for anyone who work with the youth carrying the heaviest burdens: those at the intersection of marginalization, trauma, and self-injury.

You’ll move beyond risk management checklists to understand the why beneath the behaviour. Drawing on the established theories and evidence-based interventions for self-harm, this training provides the clinical precision needed when the stakes are highest.

This workshop addresses the reality that therapy fails when it replicates the same power dynamics that harm youth in the first place. You’ll learn how to structure engagement that honours adolescent autonomy, conduct chain analyses that reveal intervention points invisible in standard assessments, and teach physiological regulation skills that work when cognitive strategies fail. We’ll tackle the specific dialectical dilemmas of adolescent treatment: how to involve parents without breaking confidentiality, how to validate pain without reinforcing dysfunction, and how to adapt evidence-based protocols for youth who experience standard therapeutic language as minimizing and unhelpful.

You’ll also confront the parts of this work that textbooks skip: how to stay regulated when a 14-year-old shows you fresh burns, how to respond when a family’s exhaustion manifests as rage, and how to maintain therapeutic boundaries while practicing the “moral courage” required to witness historical trauma.

This workshop is key to develop enough technical skill and relational capacity that young people choose to stay alive long enough to discover they want to.