Barb Desjardins, M.Ed., CYW, OATR, CTC-S
TLC Certified Trainer

Barb Desjardins, M.Ed., CYW, OATR, CTC-S Barb is a Registered Art Therapist with the Ontario Art Therapy Association, and a Trauma & Loss Consultant Supervisor with TLC. She is currently a Principal with the Thames Valley District School Board and co-chair of the board’s Traumatic Events Response Team. Barb has vast experience working with children in both the mental health and educational setting. She has presented workshops on trauma and loss in Canada, the US, Honduras and Costa Rica. Barb speaks French fluently and has a strong command of Spanish. With colleague Barb Dorrington, Barb made three trauma debriefing/art therapy trips to the Gulf Coast area affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and delivered Safe Place workshops for students as well as parent workshops in Mississippi. She maintains a small private practice in London, Ontario working with children and adults in Trauma & Loss and Art Therapy.

Barb presents the following courses:

Structured Sensory Intervention

This is the second of the three TLC core courses. You will learn trauma-specific intervention tasks and techniques as well as see them demonstrated. This is a practice day. The presenter engages attendees in an encapsulated demonstration of the major sensory structured processes. Attendees will also participate in additional activities and, by days end, will feel comfortable using any of the TLC intervention programs. A brief presentation of the TLC evidence-based research and outcome will support the value of TLC’s structured sensory programs in schools and agencies. Session objectives.

Crisis Intervention

Learn what to do in the days following a trauma when crisis intervention may be needed. Tragedies, like Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, leave behind devastation and destruction. Because victims are constantly reminded of the trauma, their state of crisis is prolonged and heightened. Very specific intervention techniques will be demonstrated which are designed to stabilize those in crisis in the days that follow exposure, at a time when specific trauma intervention would not be appropriate.

Psychophysiology of Trauma

This presentation focuses on understanding the physiology of trauma by understanding the normal life-preserving survival responses of “flight/fight/freeze” in an individual and how they fulfill nature’s species-preserving function. Investigating the disturbance of these responses forms the essential foundation for understanding symptoms that results in Posttraumatic Stress and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Trauma is fundamentally a highly activated incomplete psycho-physiological response to threat, frozen in time. What is significant in the resolution of trauma is the completion of incompleted responses to threat and the ensuing discharge of the energy that was mobilized for survival.

Trauma in the Classroom: Signs and Strategies

This full day presentation will increase awareness and understanding of the impact that grief and trauma have on student learning and on students. Through case examples we will look at the difference between grief and trauma and why some students are more at risk than others. We will explore how the arousal continuum influences the way students feel, think and act, and we’ll gain a better understanding of those stressors that increase the alarm state in traumatized children and adolescents by learning how an event is remembered by the body and central nervous system. Participants will be able to identify cognitive, sensory and behavioral signs of trauma, and learn various concrete strategies that work in the school setting to help students feel safe and maximize learning.