Glimmer Psychology Services

Glimmer-seeking 🤗🌟🌞🌈💕

A message for your child from our Activist Nicole.

Thought for the day yesterday 🌱🌻✨

Very grateful for a beautiful week of relaxation at the Glass House Retreat - walks, yoga, pilates, aqua, dance, mindfulness, sound baths, massage, arts and crafts, board games, food demos, and lots of scrumptious plant-based cuisine 🧘‍♀️💆‍♀️🏊‍♀️🛁🫧🌱🌞 Now bring on the new academic year 💪

I’ve been enjoying experimenting with the q-interactive online assessments on the iPads recently. Worked with a student last week who was successfully completing puzzles that made my head/eyes hurt 😵‍💫 Love using cognitive assessments to demonstrate a child’s strengths and skills. Anyone else able to balance these weights? 🧐🧠

What a busy academic year 😅 I’ve really enjoyed delivering trauma-informed training across a range of settings this year. Schools have described our training using the following words ⭐️

It was a privilege to attend the University of Reading this week - delivering a session on the role of the educational psychologist to undergraduate students for their Applied and Professional Psychology module.

GPS 🌈🧭🌻

Loved getting another school started on their NME journey this week - this time at a specialist provision in Bristol 🧠🥁💕

Happy new year one and all! 🌟 Hope everyone has managed to take a restful break over Christmas 🎄🎅🤶

I am currently looking for local independent trauma-informed professionals to signpost schools and families to. Please get in contact if you or anyone you know meets this criteria.

Alex 🌈🧭🌸

Absolute pleasure delivering some more NME training today. I am very passionate about the NME - a neurobiologically-respectful, developmentally-sensitive, trauma-informed approach to reframe learning and behaviour challenges in order to promote regulation, relationships and readiness for learning. So I am very excited to be getting another school started on their NME journey 🧠💕

And we always have lots of fun experimenting with those regulatory activities, as pictured 🙃🤸‍♀️🧘‍♀️🎶

Enjoying getting stuck into the NME training again - helping to embed the key principles within a group of specialist SEMH schools. We always have lots fun experimenting with a range of rhythmic/sensory/body-based activities to promote regulation for staff and students, including movement, music, dance, drumming, yoga, and breathing exercises 🤸‍♀️🎵💃🥁🧘‍♀️

The neurosequential model in education (NME) is a trauma-informed approach supporting regulation, relationships, and readiness for learning - get in touch with us over at Sussex Psychology if you'd be interested in this training for your school 🤩🧠💕

Really enjoyed facilitating a school staff workshop yesterday on 'understanding behaviour' (particularly in relation to demand avoidance) at a specialist school for children with complex social, emotional, and mental health (SEMH) needs.

I always find the iceberg model a really powerful tool to help think beyond observable behaviours that challenge - by unpicking what a young person might be communicating with their behaviour, and reframing what might be going on 'underneath the surface'. This helps us to make sense of what could be driving the behaviour we see. Seeing behaviour through a different lens also helps promote deeper empathy for the young person, and allows a shift in focus from reactive interventions to an exploration of proactive support that addresses underlying unmet needs.

I really enjoy facilitating one-to-one and group staff supervision sessions in schools. Psychological supervision is about providing staff with a safe, containing and reflective space and relationship. Through professional, emotional and peer support, staff knowledge, skills, confidence, reflective practice, and wellbeing are promoted - helping to prevent burnout.

Ending group supervision with a round of words helps staff members to reflect on their experience of the session and provides some closure from sometimes difficult discussions. These are the closing words from yesterday's session - showing some of the benefits of supervision.

Do get in touch if you would be interested in staff supervision for your school 😊

We are delighted to publish this new Evidence Review outlining the research findings of the experiences of adult who have grown up with a brother or sister with a learning disability and/or autism. This work has been led by Dr Nikita Hayden. You can read the full report at: www.sibs.org.uk/evidence

Really enjoying facilitating a series of 'circle of adults' sessions in a specialist school - the closing words pictured represent attendee reflections regarding their experience of the session at the end of the process 🧠🌈🌟💪

Circle of adults is a structured group approach that brings together a team of key adults in the child's life - to provide staff with a safe reflective space to share and contain feelings and challenges, build empathy for the young person, create a shared psychological understanding of needs, and engage in collaborative problem-solving. This helps to generate solutions/strategies/interventions based on deeper insights, in order to become 'unstuck' and move tricky situations forward - ultimately supporting staff to promote inclusion and positive change for children and young people.

CofA is a particularly helpful tool for young people with complex social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs, who may present with behaviours that challenge, and be considered at-risk of school exclusion. Please get in touch if you’d be interested in CofA for your school.

You can find out more information about CofA from Inclusive Solutions - https://inclusive-solutions.com/problem-solving/ .

Can't wait for this 📖🧠💕

"Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how the toxicity of today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance."

Hear hear!

Gabor Maté Daniel Maté

On sale day! The Myth of Normal is officially available in the U.S., Canada, and the UK today. This is Gabor’s most urgent book yet.

You can find where to purchase, here: https://drgabormate.com/book/the-myth-of-normal/

Super 🦸 Siblings 👫 Summer 🌞 Sports 🏸 Support 💙

Very well said.

"If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with 'wilting-plant-syndrome' – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt."

"I worry that a purely medicalised, individualised understanding of mental health puts plasters over big gaping wounds, without addressing the source."

"Ultimately, I’d like to see a world where we need fewer therapists. A culture that reclaims and embraces each other’s madness. Where we take the courageous (and sometimes skin-crawling) risk of turning to each other in our understandable, messy pain."

"Our distress might even be a sign of health – a telling indicator of where we can collectively resist the structures that are hurting so many of us."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/psychologist-devastating-lies-mental-health-problems-politics?fbclid=IwAR0kTtFzm7_1drejo3DQyU9If_9iApTuSWiztnR2xpaCxyrKMOiBfmTHNpI

I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health | Sanah Ahsan Society’s understanding of mental health issues locates the problem inside the person - and ignores the politics of their distress, says psychologist Sanah Ahsan

Glimmer Psychology Services updated their business hours.

Another amazing day on Monday with the wonderful siblings and volunteers of Super Siblings - support for siblings of children with additional needs 🦸👫💙 Loving being part of the Super Siblings' summer events 🎾🏸🧗🤸‍♀️🥰