Speaking & training
Photo: Georgetown University
Every system runs through a body.
I speak and train on trauma, attachment, and how history, power, and relationships shape what people can do under pressure. My work connects parenting, clinical practice, and organizational life: how we stay present, hold boundaries, navigate conflict, and build conditions that support connection and choice.
I bring more than 25 years across clinical practice, child welfare, humanitarian response, and public policy, from therapy rooms and refugee camps to government programs.
Across these settings, I have seen how often people understand what needs to change before they have the capacity or support to act on it. My sessions explore how that capacity grows through practice, relationships, and changes in the conditions around us.
All engagements are available in English and Spanish, in person and online.
Podcast
How Technology & AI Impact Our Nervous Systems. A conversation with Travis Goodman about attention, digital connection, and AI as scaffolding or substitution. Listen
Topics
The system lives in the body
Policy, enforcement, and institutional conditions are felt in bodies and relationships. They shape how children and families experience safety, whom they trust, and what they can ask for. We examine how systems organized around compliance and throughput affect connection and choice, and how policy and practice can support both.
Parenting and clinical work with children and families
How attachment and relationships shape children’s development and family life. Parent workshops focus on responding to distress, holding limits, and mending relationships after hard moments. Clinical trainings focus on play, somatic practice, and work with children and caregivers together to shift patterns families understand but cannot change.
Organizations and leadership under pressure
How stress, power, and working conditions shape leadership, relationships, and culture. Under pressure, survival takes organizational form: control, urgency, withdrawal, and agreement that hides dissent. Sessions address burnout, boundaries, and vicarious trauma: how to stay close to another person’s distress without losing our footing. We also examine the changes in workload, supervision, and leadership that make the work sustainable.
Technology, attention, and connection
How phones, feeds, and AI shape attention and relationships: digital overload, constant availability, simulated intimacy. The distinction that matters is scaffolding versus substitution: when technology supports our capacity to think and engage, and when it becomes a way around uncertainty, discomfort, or other people.
Each engagement is built for the audience and can draw across these areas.
Approach
Sessions combine teaching, guided attention to the body, discussion of practical examples, and reflection in pairs or small groups. We work with situations participants recognize: a hard moment with a child, a clinical encounter, a strained working relationship, or a decision affecting a team.
Participants develop language for recurring patterns, practice ways to respond, and identify changes they can test in their own settings.
I offer keynotes, parent workshops, clinical trainings, half- and full-day sessions, workshop series, and leadership consultation. Each engagement is shaped around the audience and what they want to understand or do differently.
Podcast
Connection, Safety and Attachment. A conversation with Kirsty Nolan about attachment across therapy, families, communities, and institutions. Listen
Who I work with
I offer talks and trainings for parents and caregivers, clinicians, and organizations across the public, nonprofit, and private sectors.
These include schools and parent associations, clinical training programs, child welfare and youth-serving agencies, arts and cultural organizations, humanitarian organizations, foundations, government bodies, law firms, other businesses, and professional conferences.
Select engagements
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Polyvagal Institute, 2026 International Gathering
Upcoming main-stage presentation: The System Lives in the Body: How History and Power Shape Nervous Systems in Conflict. Sitges, Spain, September 22–24, 2026. Event details
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Chaddock, Trauma-Informed, Relationship-Focused Conference
Keynote: Trauma, Attachment, and the Nervous System: Lessons for Healing in a Fractured Time. Event details.
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The Clemente and Canal Projects
Experiential workshop, Dept of Transformation: Un-familia-r, exploring embodied awareness, self-reflection, and connection through individual and group exercises. New York, June 2024. Event details
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Acacia Center for Justice
Six-part training series on nervous system regulation, vicarious trauma, and the organizational conditions that make relational work sustainable
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Office of Refugee Resettlement, Unaccompanied Children Program
National training for U.S. government staff and partners on relational engagement with children and youth. Watch an excerpt
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Well-Being Transformation Colllaborative Conference (Casey Family Programs)
Plenary, The System Lives in the Body, and workshop, Crossing Over and Coming Back, on power, nervous systems, and sustaining relational work. Detroit, August 2026.
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Immigration and child welfare conference (Casey Family Programs)
Training for child-welfare agency leaders on nervous system patterns in organizational decision-making, communication, and culture. Sacramento, California. November 2025.
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New Museum
In-person training series for teaching artists on trauma-informed approaches to working with young people. New York City.
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University of the Philippines–Philippine General Hospital, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine
Plenary Speaker, Baltazar V. Reyes Jr. Psychotherapy Lecture Series 2026, for Filipino mental health professionals.
In the media
NYC News Segment
Highlighted how school stability supports healing, connection, and success for children in foster care
New York City Council Testimony
Testified on the importance of school stability for children in foster care.
Georgetown University
Moderated a conversation on faith, child rights, and family values.
Aspen Institute Fellowship
Values-based leadership program for nonprofit leaders.
Book a talk or training
Tell me about your audience, proposed dates, and what you want the session to help people understand or do.