13/10/2026
What happens to a child’s inner world when violence becomes part of family life?
🪞 Post-Webinar Reflections 🪞
On October 7, 2026, the IAGP Family Therapy Section organized a webinar entitled “Children and Adolescents Are More Than Just Witnesses in Domestic Violence,” presented by Fernando Lacasa, PhD, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist from Barcelona, and moderated by Maite Pi Ordóñez.
Children do not merely observe violence between adults. They see, hear, sense, anticipate, and respond. Even when violence is not directed at them, they become involved in its emotional and relational consequences, sometimes assuming roles of protector, mediator, or bearer of conflicts that adults themselves cannot contain.
Drawing on clinical experience and therapeutic programmes developed in Catalonia, Fernando Lacasa emphasized the importance of early recognition, interdisciplinary collaboration, and interventions addressing both traumatic symptoms and family relationships. Particular attention was given to the intergenerational transmission of violence and to therapeutic work with mothers and children.
The presentation highlighted individual and group approaches focused on emotional regulation, interpersonal relationships, and the restoration of trust. Research findings suggested improvements in several trauma-related dimensions, including emotional clarity, avoidance, negative mood, and somatic complaints.
Particularly moving was a sailing project involving mothers and children affected by domestic violence, offering opportunities for shared experiences of cooperation, empowerment, and renewed connection.
How Can We Sail Together Without Getting Seasick?
The webinar also invited us to consider the child's subjective experience — the inner world that may remain largely invisible to adults.
What happens when the psychological space needed for play, imagination, and spontaneity becomes occupied by vigilance and the anticipation of danger?
Xavier Legrand's film Custody (2017) offers a powerful cinematic exploration of this experience. Through its restrained cinematic language, the film reveals how a child becomes entangled in the emotional dynamics of domestic violence. Silence, bodily tension, hesitation, and watchfulness express an inner world organized around fear, while the child struggles with responsibilities that no child should have to bear.
A complementary perspective emerges in Colm Bairéad's The Quiet Girl (2022). Although the film explores emotional neglect rather than domestic violence in the same form as Custody, it offers a moving portrayal of the transformative potential of a caring relationship. Through small gestures, shared routines, and attentive silence, a young girl gradually discovers what it means to be seen, recognized, and emotionally held.
The video of a child drawing, presented during the webinar, offers another meaningful association. Drawing, like play and other forms of symbolic expression, can give shape to experiences that are difficult to communicate through words. It reminds us that the child's inner world may speak through images, gestures, bodily expressions, and silence.
Perhaps one of psychotherapy's essential tasks is not simply to help children speak about what has happened, but to create conditions in which their emotional experiences can be recognized, contained, and gradually transformed.
A child is never merely a witness to the emotional life of a family. A child lives within it, is shaped by it, and carries something of it into their developing inner world.
The question that remains is how we, as therapists, families, and communities, can help create relational conditions in which children's inner worlds may once again become places of imagination, connection, creativity, and possibility.
We thank Fernando Lacasa, Maite Pi Ordóñez, and the IAGP Family Therapy Section for opening this important conversation.
🪞 Post-Webinar Reflections are an invitation to continue thinking together beyond the webinar itself. We warmly welcome further reflections from participants and colleagues 🪞
🪶On behalf of the IAGP Webinar Task Force
Violeta Goldman, PhD
Psychologist, Group and Individual Psychotherapist
[email protected]
