BREAKING THE CYCLE OF INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA
Playful | Present | Passionate
Dafna is an international trainer and supervisor for practitioners who work with children and families. She is a certified trainer and supervisor/consultant in both Theraplay and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP). Dafna’s expertise is drawn from 25 years of working with families with attachment in many settings: at-risk after school programs, therapeutic foster care, in-home crisis stabilization, residential care and private practice. Dafna’s style, whether as a therapist or teacher, is combining the light-hearted with the profound by bringing a playful, intense and passionate presence to every encounter. She is as likely to break out into song as engage in serious intellectual discourse.
FEATURED COURSE
The IAFT Training Course is a twelve-hour training course led by Dafna Lender, using principles from two attachment-based modalities - Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy and Theraplay. It teaches how to enhance regulation, connection, and joy between parents and children and guides parents to do reparative work around family trauma.
This workshop training offers a different lens that focuses on the physiologic, nonverbal connection between parent and child to improve the relationship. Using principles from two attachment-based modalities—Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy and Theraplay—learn how to enhance regulation, connection, and joy between parents and children as well as guide parents to do reparative work around family trauma.
Learn more →Integrated Attachment Family Therapy (IAFT) was developed by family therapy expert and attachment specialist Dafna Lender. Instead of viewing the child as the problem, IAFT addresses the crux of the issue: a misalignment in the parent-child relationship.
In this treatment guide, Dafna walks readers through the IAFT framework, providing therapeutic insight and concrete strategies to help families achieve meaningful and lasting change.
Order now! →Training Programs
Join Dafna Lender for a 5-day course on Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, an approach which assists therapists and other professionals to understand and effectively support children, young people and their families.
LEVEL 1
April 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 2025 8:30 AM 2:00 PM (Central Time, USA & Canada)
LEVEL 2
January 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 2025
8:30 AM - 2:00 PM (Central Time, USA & Canada)
3 hour on-demand training
If you’re interested in learning more about intergenerational trauma, check out my course with Therapy Wisdom, Breaking the Cycle of Intergenerational Trauma: Helping Your Clients Heal Attachment Wounds Through Parent-Child Relationships. This self-paced, three hour course teaches you:
The P.A.C.E. Attitude and how you can apply it
Techniques to build a healing and connected relationship with a parent and their child
How improving the relationship between parent and child helps adults with their own childhood history
RESOURCES
Listen to the interview with Guy Macpherson on his podcast The Trauma Therapist Project. They talked about Dafna's work with kids and families, her approach, experience and much more.
Listen Now →Sit down with Dafna Lender as she shares with you conversations with 3 different experts: Peter Levine, Stephen Porges, and Bessel van der Kolk.
Theraplay is an intervention that focuses on enhancing the connection, trust and joy between a child and a parent. It involves interactive, playful activities using simple face-to-face reciprocal interactions, and involves using all of the senses, including rhythm, movement and touch.
Learn More →I’m getting ready to teach a 4-part workshop series on parenting from a polyvagal perspective and it’s making me think long and hard about my everyday experiences and how Polyvagal Theory (PVT) helps explain my reactions to daily events.
One of the most important decisions a therapist makes is how broadly to define the problem that clients bring into treatment. In an individualistic culture such as ours, it’s common to focus narrowly on whoever is exhibiting problem behavior, without understanding the wider family context shaping the issues of immediate concern. Often the key to working effectively with a family is expanding the therapeutic perspective to include the history of intergenerational trauma underlying the present-day issues, even if that’s not the family’s view of the origins of the presenting problem.
How do parent/child relationships affect a person even into their adult years? Dafna takes a look at a case study of a patient with avoidant attachment and examines how therapists can encourage the formation of secure relationships.
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