Katherine Wacholz MEd, CTC
TLC Certified Trainer

Katherine has over 30 years’ experience in the field of Education. She has taught all age groups and subjects. Most of her experience is in Special Education. Katherine was honored with the “Teacher of the Year” distinction for her district and County in California. She holds two Masters Degrees and is currently working on her doctorate in education. Katherine and her husband own and operate a ranch for special needs and terminally ill children in Hayden Lake Idaho. She felt that to combine the special needs of children and the majestic nature of a horse was a natural combination. The animals give the children the opportunity to connect, which is an important part of a child’s normal development. Katherine is nationally certified by EAGALA an equine assisted growth and learning program. This method provides a unique experience that allows a child or family the opportunity for physical and emotional growth. These powerful horses promote confidence and self-esteem, while motivating to interact and grow stronger. The K2 Equestrian Center provides a place of survival, survival of the spirit. It is the place of the “Healing Horse.”

Katherine presents the following courses:

Children of Trauma

This is the first of three TLC core courses that will lay the foundation to help you understand the differences between grief and trauma and to see trauma as an experience rather than a diagnostic category. Learn how to become a “witness” to a child’s traumatic experience to best appreciate the intensity of the experience and the needs of the child; to see what he now sees as he looks at himself and the world around him. Video-taped interviews will demonstrate how TLC’s evidence-based, structured sensory intervention process brings children relief from the terror of their traumatic experiences. This structured process is used in schools and agencies across the country and has been proven, via research, to reduce trauma-specific reactions across all three major sub-categories

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

Suicide Intervention

This presentation will identify warning signs and high risk factors leading to suicidal attempts. Characteristics of potentially suicidal child/youth, specific interventions strategies and skills including legal responsibilities, assessment of risk and what is necessary to help prevent contagion following an actual completion. Develop specific intervention skills with survivors of suicide including organized responses necessary in school settings and the ways grief following suicide differs from grief following non-suicidal losses.

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.