Having Difficult Conversations–Creating/Using Scripts to Talk about Illness, Death, Suicide, Violence, Drugs, & Racism

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

Some of the most challenging parts of our work with youth in the system is learning how to introduce and frame the toughest of life’s topics into safe and supportive conversations. In this workshop, participants will be given the opportunity to identify their own emotional balance needs when engaging these conversations and practice sample scripts to improve their skills around them. In both dyad and small groups, participants will also brainstorm script designs to meet the needs of their particular population of youth who live in out of home care.

Learning Objectives

During this session, participants will:

· Learn how to identify their personal challenges around approaching highly emotional topics and turn them into strengths;

· Develop strategies for structuring activities and conversations to engage system involved youth in processing tough life experiences, including strategies for identifying and accommodating the unique needs and contexts of system involved group members; and

· Practice multiple ways to use space, volume and self-knowledge to build rapport with youth in their care.

Agenda 

9:00am-9:45am Instructor and Group introduces selves and discuss successful and awkward attempts in conversation around many painful and messy topics with the youth they support

9:45am-10:30am Teaching: Creating physical and relational space for yourself and clients around vulnerable topics of discussion

10:30am-10:45am BREAK (CEUs will not be offered for this time)

10:45am-11:45am Small group activity: Participants will use provided scripts to role play various conversations with different youth

11:45am-12:00pm Large Group debrief and discussion of role play challenges

12:00pm-12:30pm LUNCH BREAK (CEUs will not be offered for this time)

12:30pm-1:15pm Group Activity: Participants will engage and honor the emotional skills and boundaries needed to hold space and transform reactions into responses. Participants will be led through a breath and grounding exercise to hone the awareness they will need to be successful at these types of conversations.

1:15pm-1:30pm BREAK (CEUs will not be offered for this time)

1:30pm-2:45pm Using your new skills, design a script and framing for a conversation with one youth from your specific client population

2:45pm-3:00pm Questions and course evaluation

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 (5) 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.