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Up to 125 traumatised local children and young people (CYP) up to the age of 18 will continue to receive highly specialised support from the CHUMS Trauma Service (CTS) thanks to a generous grant from Bedfordshire Freemasons.

This £60,000 grant will help these young people to thrive and live much healthier lives. The key aim of the Trauma Service is to decrease the distress and increase the functioning of all those vulnerable young people that are referred to the charity. More holistically, these interventions directly lead to improved mental health and emotional wellbeing, enabling them to reach their true potential, whatever their situation.

CHUMS is always there for the community, and responsive to ever-changing need. There is no funded support where trauma is involved, due to the extended period of support required; an average of 12-16 one-to-one sessions which involves getting the CYP to a point where they are calm enough to revisit the trauma and process those traumatic memories in a safe environment. Only then can they move on from the hypervigilance and constant reliving of the trauma and go on to reach their true potential. Once stabilised, CYP are helped to tell their story using reprocessing techniques in order to “process” the traumatic memories and enable them to be stored unobtrusively in the brain as normal memories.