Designing a Spiritual Care Toolbox for Teaching Youth Options for Managing Stressful Life Responses

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

The developmental processes of both youth and adults generate coping tools that can give great insights into some of the choices they can make today. In the second year of the pandemic, as we continue to cope with all of its stressors, it is an opportunity to teach these youth and families ways to evaluate and make healthy choices about which tools we'll continue to use (or borrow from a friend) to provide the best support to move forward. The workshop will teach you how to show them ways to creatively alter their perception of coping styles, both successful and not, allowing them to see a larger and more complete assortment of tools to choose from to support their spirits. The aim is to refine our insights and to use the best tool for the job.

Learning Objectives

• Learn to identify multiple coping strategies for stress that youth have and understand how they are impacted by their environment, culture and changes in family structure.
• Facilitate supporting youth to recognize emotionally relevant personal strategies through the use of a creative and artistic activity.
• Practice spiritual assessment techniques for managing perspectives on coping with fear, isolation, and personal growth.

Agenda 

1:30-1:40pm  Instructor introduce self, my professional and personal history with grief and  education

1:40-2:00pm  Group introductions: What work do you do? How are you coping?

2:00-2:20pm  Teaching: Grief and trauma are not linear, therefore healing and coping must go hand-in-hand with creative approaches that utilize various cultural, family, community, and spiritual aspects of strength.

2:20-2:45pm  Guided Group Exercise: Spiritual assessment based exercise that provides an individual with an opportunity to review the historical context in which he or she has been coping and healing.

2:45-3:00pm  Group Activity: Participants will fill their toolbox using artistic visioning and colored pens

3:00-3: 15pm  Group Activity: Participants will use cultural support models to personalize and beautify their virtual toolbox

3:15-3:30pm  Group discussion: What is the emotional impact of physically manifesting this exercise

3:30-4:00pm  Teaching: Dealing with resistance, judgment and freeze responses to art. Creative problem solving and utilizing this activity with your work.

4:00-4:15pm  Final questions and answers

4:15-4:30pm  Summary of uses of this tool and class evaluations

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.”

Shoshana has developed a range of learning interventions and activities including:

• Developing an ethical will
• Developing a "spiritual toolbox" for journeying through life's deepest challenges,
• Bereavement training programs for social workers, care aides, case managers and paraprofessionals
• Grief support programs for groups and teams
• Needs assessment tool for anticipatory grief and loss in clients and families
• Art-therapy based grief support for children

She is also the author of The Phoenixx Haggadah.

This course meets the qualifications for (3) BBS CEUs 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.