1 Full day course
This course overview is designed to position you as a specialist who understands the psychological "underworld" of gaslighting. In the UK care and education sectors, gaslighting is often misunderstood as just "lying"—your course corrects this by framing it as a safeguarding risk and a barrier to placement stability.
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Recognition, Impact, and Prevention Training
1. Course Purpose & Commercial Value
Gaslighting is a sophisticated form of psychological manipulation that erodes a victim’s sense of reality. For services, unidentified gaslighting leads to placement breakdowns, staff burnout, and failed safeguarding interventions. This course exists to protect your most vulnerable residents/service users by ensuring their voices aren’t silenced by a perpetrator’s narrative. Its value lies in reducing the "revolving door" of failed support by identifying the root cause of psychological harm.
2. Who the Course Is For
This training is essential for those on the front lines of care and decision-making:
• Registered Managers & Senior Staff: To identify gaslighting within staff teams or family dynamics.
• Foster Carers & Adoptive Parents: To support children who may have experienced (or be mirroring) these behaviours.
• Residential Care Workers: To manage complex peer-to-peer relationships.
• Social Workers & Family Support Workers: To enhance assessment accuracy during home visits.
3. Key Risks & Gaps Addressed
• The "Invisible" Safeguarding Gap: Gaslighting leaves no physical bruises, meaning it often bypasses standard safeguarding checks.
• Identity Erosion: For young people, particularly those from marginalised backgrounds, gaslighting can be used to weaponise their identity against them.
• Compliance Failure: Failing to recognise coercive control (which includes gaslighting) can lead to non-compliance with the Domestic Abuse Act 2021.
4. Core Learning Outcomes
• Confidence: Ability to spot the "red flags" of psychological grooming and reality-warping.
• Competence: Skills to document psychological abuse in a way that stands up in professional reviews.
• Reduced Risk: Earlier intervention in toxic dynamics before they escalate into physical harm or placement collapse.
• Better Engagement: Empowering victims to trust their own perceptions, leading to more honest and effective support sessions.
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5. Course Content Breakdown
• What is Gaslighting: Understanding of Psychological Manipulation
• The Anatomy of a Lie: Tactics and techniques, Understanding the difference between a simple lie and the systemic "shaving of the truth" that constitutes gaslighting.
• The Victim’s Reality: A deep dive into the psychological impact—brain fog, "fawn" responses, and the internalised belief that "I am the problem."
• Professional Gaslighting: How "the system" can accidentally gaslight service users, and how to ensure your practice remains trauma-informed.
• Identifying the Perpetrator’s Playbook: Recognising common tactics: Countering, Withholding, Trivialising, and Diverting.
• Recovery & Boundary Setting: Practical strategies for rebuilding a victim’s trust in their own memory and senses.
• Law & Legislation – Our Duty of Care and how to protect ourselves.
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6. Practical Application
Immediately after this training, staff will:
1. Change their Documentation: Moving from "User was being difficult" to "User expressed confusion regarding previous agreements, suggesting a pattern of external manipulation."
2. Use "Grounding" Techniques: Helping service users anchor themselves in facts when they feel their reality is being challenged.
3. Audit Communication: Recognising when a parent or peer is "triangulating" information to cause conflict.
7. Safeguarding & Compliance Relevance
This isn't just a "soft skills" course; it’s a risk-mitigation tool. It aligns with the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 (recognition of coercive control) and Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE). We move beyond the "local authority jargon" to provide staff with the actual language needed to escalate concerns that are currently "slipping through the cracks."
8. Delivery Format
• A 1-day intensive session (Online/In-person).
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9. Why This Course Is Different
Lived Experience + Professional Authority. Most gaslighting training is purely theoretical. This course is built on the intersection of professional safeguarding expertise and a deep, lived understanding of how these dynamics play out in real-world, high-pressure environments. I don't just teach the definition of gaslighting; I teach the feeling of it and the functional tools to stop it. Course contents are accessible to Neurodivergent individuals and those with learning disabilities to offer Equality for Learners.
Prices £85pp