Creating a Culture of Belonging: Moving From Trauma-Informed Care to Healing Centered Care

This experiential workshop will focus on relationship centered principles of infant and early childhood mental health grounded in the framework of healing centered engagement. This framework honors the inherent capacity and hopefulness within individuals and communities which systems seek to serve and moves beyond “what happened to you?” to “what’s right with you?”. The workshop will focus on shared language in the frameworks mentioned above. Participants will develop and co-create an experiential learning space to lean into "who we are in the work and how we are in the work" in order to serve babies and families in culturally responsive spaces of belonging and care.

Aditi Subramanium

Aditi Subramaniam, LMHC, R-DMT, IECMH-E®, is a licensed mental health clinician and registered movement psychotherapist with more than twenty years of experience in the field of mental health, in India and Boston. In her professional role, she serves as the Director of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Policy at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (MSPCC) leading statewide infant and early childhood mental health workforce development efforts and a partnership between MSPCC and the Massachusetts Association for Infant Mental Health (MassAIMH) focused on enhancing, diversifying, and supporting the infant and early childhood mental health workforce to improve access to services for children age birth – 6 and their families. Under her leadership, Ms. Subramaniam collaborates with partners across the state to address gaps and opportunities in workforce needs in the early childhood system to result in better outcomes for all. Ms. Subramaniam is both a clinician at heart and a reflective systems leader, committed to justice-informed policy, implementation, and practice toward creating equitable systems to meet the needs of Massachusetts’ youngest children and their families. Her areas of interest include reflective supervision/consultation; community and family-focused initiatives; workforce and systems development; healing-centered care; and the integration of the expressive arts in psychotherapy in working with families and systems. 

She is also a national trainer at the Brazelton Institute at Boston Children’s Hospital, for the Newborn Behavioral Observation (NBO), and at the Brazelton Touchpoints Center as a National Touchpoints trainer. Ms. Subramaniam is a graduate of the ERH Fellowship (Infant-Parent Mental Health Post-Graduate Fellowship Program) and a graduate of Infant Observation at the Infant-Parent Training Institute of Jewish Family & Children’s Service. She serves as core faculty at the Early Relational Health Fellowship at UMass Chan Medical. Her experience includes dyadic early childhood clinical work, reflective supervision, family engagement, and working with systems to build capacity in justice-informed early childhood mental health. She is a ZeroToThree Fellow (2022-2024), is a certified DC 0-5 trainer, and is endorsed as an Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Mentor- Clinical®.

The principles and practices of liberation and the creative arts as healing are foundational in her everyday work and lens. She lives in Boston, MA with her husband and daughter. She is a trained Indian classical and folk dancer and continues to enjoy dancing, yoga, and making art. She is humbled by parenting and learning from the wonders of childhood with her daughter.