Child Development Stages & the Grief Process-Developing & Promoting Healthy Family Dynamics for System Involved Youth

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

This training will teach training participants how to perform creative/artistic activities they can use to help system-involved-youth to process grief experiences and build stronger relationships with those around them. First, participants will learn about how a system-involved-youth’s developmental stage interacts with their processing of grief. Then, they will learn multiple activities that can be applied to helping system involved children process their grief and communicate their feelings.

Learning Objectives

● Participants will be able to identify and explain at least 2 different models of grief and how stage of development influences how system involved youth engage in the grief process.

● Participants will be able to identify and apply at least 2 different creative and artistic activities to help system involved youth process and articulate their feelings.

● Participants will be able to acquire the skill to lead a system involved youth through at least 2 activities designed to facilitate personal safety, foster positive changes in family dynamics, and age appropriate coping strategies.

Agenda 

10:-10:30pm  Instructor introduces self, Group introduces selves: Who are you? What work do you do? Relationship to grief?

10:30-10:55 am  Teaching: Experiences with bereavement. Identifying safe space

10:50-11:05am  Large Group activity: Creating (Draw/marker/crayon) a safe space in grief discussions/engagements

11:05-11:25am  Teaching: Understanding grief, recognizing regression, and children's development.

11:25-12:00pm  Break out exercise: Dramatic reading & response

12:00-12:15pm  Break (CE hours will not be offered for this time)

12:15-12:35pm  Teaching: Family dynamics and the changing roles in and after grief

12:35-1:00pm  Breakout Activity: Read the scenario and write a dialog or script for how you might playfully integrate grief tasks into an engagement/activity with the child.

1:00-1:15pm  Discussion/reflection in large group

1:15-1:30pm  Closing discussion and feedback

Meet Our Trainer

“We can create together. We can heal together. We can mark the moments of ritual together. May the work of our hearts and hands speak together the truth of our lives.”

Shoshana has been working with communities and professional caregivers educating and training on the issues and challenges around progressive illness, trauma, death and bereavement for families for over 36 years. In that work she has supported people in many ways and forms as they experience illness, grief, healing, recovery, and transformation.

She began her grief and loss professional journey during the illness and death of both of her parents when she was a teenager. She subsequently served a residency in Berkeley to become an interfaith chaplain and now describes herself as “a Jewish chaplain, who works from an interfaith perspective”.

She has trained, counselled, and supported adults and children dealing with terminal illnesses, (and students/volunteers wanting to learn) using art modalities and non-traditional approaches

The thread that stitches together all the pieces of her work life is care, compassion and comfort for suffering people who find themselves outside the system of norms in American mainstream culture.

As a person who has lived outside those norms all her life, Mama Shoshana says with conviction, “We have our unconventional ways, and I am here to tell you that they are valid. There are many roads up this mountain called life, and we survive the unimaginable by stitching together all that we learn from one another.”

This course meets the qualifications for (2.75) BBS CE hours for LCSWs, LMFTs, LPCCs, and LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences & is provided by Fred Finch Youth Center, CAMFT Provider #045295.