Designing a Spiritual Care Toolbox to Help System Involved Youth Manage Stressful Life Responses

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

Developmental processes generate coping tools that can give great insights into some of the choices system involved youth and families can make today. This training will provide an opportunity to learn how to teach system involved youth, and those that support them, ways to evaluate and make healthy choices about which tools should continue to be used (or should be borrowed from a friend) to provide the best support to move forward. The workshop will teach you how to show system involved youth and their families 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 and positive outcomes. The aim is to refine our insights and to use the best tools for the job.

Learning Objectives

● Identify at least two strategies which can help system involved youth increase both their awareness of their coping strategies for stress and their understanding about how they are impacted by their environment, culture, and changes in family structure.

● Acquire at least one creative and artistic activity which can be used to support system involved youth in recognizing emotionally relevant personal strategies.

● Acquire at least 2 spiritual assessment techniques for managing perspectives on coping with fear, isolation, and personal growth.

Agenda 

10:00-10:10am  Instructor introduce self, my professional and personal history with grief and  education

10:10-10:30am  Group introductions: What work do you do? How are you coping?

10:30-10:50am 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.

10:50-11:15am 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.

11:15-11:30am Group Activity: Participants will fill their toolbox using artistic visioning and colored pens

11:30-11:45am Group Activity: Participants will use cultural support models to personalize and beautify their virtual toolbox

11:45-12:00pm Group discussion: What is the emotional impact of physically manifesting this exercise

12:00-12:30pm Teaching: Dealing with resistance, judgment and freeze responses to art. Creative problem solving and utilizing this activity with your work.

12:30-12:45pm Final questions and answers

12:45-1:00pm Summary of uses of this tool and class evaluations

Meet Our Trainer

Shoshana Phoenixx-Dawn

“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 (3.0) 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.