The 2024 DDPI Worldwide Conference was the largest DDP conference that we’ve ever held. We couldn’t have achieved such a successful event without the generosity of our sponsors, none more so than our Platinum Sponsor, Dr. George Thompson and The Listening Parent Community.
Dr. George Thompson is the Polyvagal Institute Board Chairman, former DDPI Board member, DDP Practitioner and Child Psychiatrist, who specialises in working with traumatised young people in residential care. He is the author of several books on DDP and Polyvagal Theory, most recently “Working with Relational Trauma in Children’s Residential Care: A Guide to Using Dyadic Developmental Practice”.
I recently sat down with George over Zoom, to discuss his work, The Listening Parent Community and the importance of supporting DDP and DDPI Worldwide in their work towards becoming a more equitable and socially just organisation.
Liz Tower (LT)
Hi George, so good to meet with you today. Can you tell our readers about The Listening Parent Community?
George Thompson (GT)
Hi Liz, thank you for having me.
So, I get requests from people all the time to answer questions about parenting. Parenting is hard these days no matter how well your children are doing. There are so many different challenges with things online or stress about climate, politics, polarisation, all kinds of things that it didn’t seem like we were facing as parents 10 or 20 years ago.
And since I’ve been involved with DDP for a number of years, with Polyvagal Theory, working with traumatised kids and working just in general as a child psychiatrist, people ask me questions about their kids.
Knowing how much stress parents are under, I really wanted to find a way to support them. What I know is that, learning from Dan Hughes and from other very experienced and smart people in the DDP network, that sometimes a few tweaks to what we’re doing as parents can make a big difference.
And so I decided to do what I could to support parents to listen to their child in ways that would allow them to form more secure bonds, and help their relationships become even more of a source of strength and comfort. Because that’s what DDP is all about, building bonds of attachment.
I thought an online community would be a good way of providing support to parents. Both the support that I can provide as somebody that has a lot of experience as well as access to other people with a lot of experience. The community would also be a way for parents to support each other.
The Listening Parent Community provides at least three different things.
One is that they get a weekly email where I’ll take a particular topic to dive into and explain something. It has a thought for the week, something to contemplate, and also has a tip that they can try.
So for example, if they’re working on listening to their kids, one of the tips for the week was hold your tongue for a minute if you have something good to say, and try saying “tell me more about that” once during a conversation.
Now, that’s a very small thing. It’s kind of an obvious thing in some ways, but something that I, as a father, often don’t think about and it can have a big impact. When we say “tell me more” it conveys to the child that we’re interested in their experiences, we want to know what it’s like to be them, what they are going through, and it opens the door for them to tell us even more of their innermost thoughts.
And that kind of thing builds a bond of attachment. It builds a connection at a deep level. And those kinds of connections at a deep level are resources for when things become more challenging.
At the end of the year, you’ve had 52 new parenting tips that you’ve tried. And hopefully these are simple enough so that we’re not stressing people out, because the last thing I want to do is add more stress to the parents’ life.
Every month I’ll also do a live masterclass via Zoom and talk about different aspects of really listening to kids to form this kind of deep connection that I’m talking about. And then those get recorded and archived so that anybody joining the community can listen back to all of the masterclasses that are there.
LT
Are the masterclasses presentations on a topic? Or conversations?
GT
I’ll talk about a particular topic. And then parents can ask questions. For example, in the last masterclass, I talked about different aspects of experience. One of the parents volunteered to talk about their experiences and allowed me to talk with them about each aspect. What were the events that happened? What were the emotions they went through? What kind of sensations they felt in their body?
And then on a regular basis, we have guest experts. This launched on the 1st of July and we’ve had one guest expert so far, Dr. Jon Baylin, who’s written books with Dan Hughes. He talked about how where in our brain that we think about our kids plays a difference in how we think about them.
He called his talk ‘Location, Location, Location’. He talked about how if we’re upset with our kid, changing the location that we’re thinking about them in our brain, changes how we think about them. And parents got to ask him questions.
LT
Oh wow!
GT
Isn’t that cool? It was very fun, he liked it and he wants to come back. The parents wanted him to come back and that’s recorded for people to hear.
Coming up we have a number of people that have agreed to be guest experts, including a number of DDP Trainers, like Dan Hughes, the founder and creator of DDP, Kim Golding, Edwina Grant, Sian Phillips and Brandon Mock. We also have Deb Dana and Dr. Liz Charles from the polyvagal world in the coming months as well.
LT
And so they would talk about their specialisms?
GT
Right. Brandon said he’d like to talk about Dan’s seven rules for parenting. Dan said people could ask him questions and he might just talk about whatever he wants to talk about on that day.
I really think that’ll be an ongoing, really rich set of resources from people with lots of experience. And again, those will be recorded and archived as well.
The last part is that there’s an online Facebook group so that parents in this community can talk with each other, compare notes and talk about each week as they’re trying out the tips I’m providing in the emails.
If they have something that’s cool that’s happened, if they have questions or they’ve encountered something and other parents have encountered that too they can share it.
LT
Sounds great. How do you moderate the Facebook group? Do you leave the parents to it and the parents keep that space or are you present in the group?
GT
I have a team of people lightly moderating the discussions, so that if something were unsafe my team would let me know about that. There is an eye on safety and I show up from time to time as well.
As we know, safety is really important. We want to make sure that it’s a safe space for people who are coming from different experiences. And it’s a vulnerable kind of thing to talk about how we’re raising our kids. If we have a question, or feel like we’ve made a mistake, or if we wish we had done something differently, how we repair those kinds of things, those are all really tender spots for us. You know there’s hardly anything, maybe nothing, that can make us feel more vulnerable than talking about our hopes and doubts about our parenting.
That’s the idea, I wanted to be able to provide support to parents and bring some amazing information and perspectives that people like Dan Hughes and Kim Golding have been learning over the last 30-40 years and make that accessible to people.
And so part of the way that it’s accessible is that this is a low-cost community, the cost eventually will be $27 USD a month.
LT
Around £20 for people in the UK depending on currency exchange rates.
GT
And right now there’s a founder’s rate of $17 USD a month until October 31st. So for people at the conference it’ll be $17 a month, which is around £13 GBP. And as long as a person is a member that’ll be their rate forever.
LT
We’ve also had a number of queries from people living in the UK about whether they can join?
GT
Yes, absolutely! There are people from the UK that are members of the community already. The masterclasses and guest experts that we’ve had have been at noon Eastern time in the US which was 5pm in the UK. I do have an eye towards the UK but there may be certain times when people from Australia want to join. People would be able to listen after the fact to recordings if they’re not able to make that time.
LT
We’ve talked about how your approach with the community is linked with what you’ve learned through DDP. How does DDP, DDP practice and its themes weave through this approach?
GT
I call it The Listening Parent Community. And one of the things that’s central to DDP is attuned listening. The PACE approach, being playful, accepting, curious, and empathic is central to DDP and central to attuned listening. Attuned listening involves listening to our children in a way that they feel like we understand their experience, they feel seen and heard, that we get what they’re going through.
In Dan Hughes’ work, he started out working with really traumatised kids who in order to survive had to stop trusting adults because the adults in their lives weren’t trustworthy. And in order to help them get better, once they did have trustworthy adults in their lives, you had to help them learn to turn back on their willingness to engage with adults, to take a risk in listening to them, to allow the adults to comfort them, and to support them.
This PACEful approach really was key to that and really powerful in my learning 12 or 14 years ago. As a child psychiatrist, I understood some about attuned listening, but I learned so much more from Dan Hughes, especially about working with traumatised kids.
Well, we can apply those insights, those strategies, skills, attitudes, and that way of being in the world with our kids. So that we can build stronger bonds of attachment with our kids, even if they haven’t been traumatised, even if they haven’t really stopped trusting.
Because we all have moments when we are more trusting and moments, especially when we’re stressed, that we’re less trusting.
The guest experts that I mentioned come from the DDP world and some will come from outside because I believe in cross-pollination and learning from each other.
LT
Wonderful. I think it’s really important for us, for DDP, for our organisation in general to be outward looking and make more external connections. Bringing parents whose children perhaps have not experienced early-life trauma to this practice, to PACE is really interesting.
GT
One of the things I’ve learned in my 35 years as a Child Psychiatrist is that when we study the ways that things don’t work, we learn about the ways that things do work.
My children were having some issues, and I first heard about DDP from a therapist that my children had been referred to. At about the same time, I learned about DDP from our Director of Nursing, who was working with a therapist who had done DDP training. My work at the time was in a residential facility with kids who had experienced a lot of trauma. Suddenly, I was practising how to be PACEful both at home and at work, and so I was practising 24/7 and seeing how powerful it could be.
What we’ve learned is not just how DDP works with traumatised kids, but how it works with people. Turns out that it’s very important to understand each other deeply.
I’d like to recommend a book by David Brooks, who’s a New York Times columnist, called “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen”, which came out last year.
He says there’s just one foundational social skill, the ability to understand what another person is going through, to see someone else deeply and make them feel deeply seen.
And so really this is, I think, the core of DDP. That we’re going to help a child feel deeply seen, even a child that may not want to be seen because they’ve been traumatised and they have shame about it. If we do that in small doses over time, then a child can really come to see themselves differently and come to trust our intentions as adults that we actually want to know them and see them and that we love them and appreciate them and that we’re not going to hurt them.
LT
Can you talk about why you wanted to sponsor the conference?
GT
I wanted to tell people about The Listening Parent Community, but I also wanted to support the work of the DDP Institute, and of this conference in particular, because of its emphasis on intersectionality.
Building on what we were talking about, the heart of DDP is really about understanding what children are going through. As humans, learning to understand what each other is going through and to have some curiosity and empathy about it, leads us to getting along better as a species, and we don’t always get along so well.
When humans work together, we can do amazing things. Humans have worked together to send a rocket to Mars that had a remote controlled vehicle. And on the remote-controlled vehicle was a remote-controlled helicopter.
LT
It’s so cool!
GT
It was cool. So when we work together, we can fly remote control helicopters on Mars. When we don’t work together, we kill each other off, physically, literally, spiritually and emotionally. When we learn to be safe with each other and to be curious, accepting of each other’s experiences, and have a little playfulness, which means that we enjoy each other, then the world can be a better place.
I’m very much in favour of supporting the DDP Institute in its valuable work in doing these kind of things.
I also know that it’s very important for the DDP Institute that we see and hear the experiences of people whose experiences don’t always get seen and heard. People that have been discriminated against, marginalised and their voices suppressed.
I was in as soon as I heard that my sponsorship would support this effort to elevate the voices of people who haven’t been heard. I felt your intention to help people from diverse perspectives attend the conference was so important. That the DDP conference would really explore intersectionality, to help us hear and see each other at deep levels in our uniqueness, even when these are difficult conversations. That just seems like such a worthwhile goal to support.
LT
Thank you, George. It was just really wonderful receiving that sponsorship from you and thank you for talking with me today.
GT
Thank you Liz, great to speak with you too! I appreciate having the opportunity to be part of such a meaningful event.
The Listening Parent Community
Platinum Sponsor
