Understanding How 8-Sessions Grief Support Groups Can Support System-Involved Youth with Complex Histories

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

This training will explore a design of grief group that supports improved outcomes for system-involved youth. As complicated as the grief experience can be, for system involved youth who have experienced multiple losses of many kinds, the structure developed for grief groups needs to be thoughtful and have measured activities for focusing the participants, guiding them through the week-by-week process, and learning to develop trust with the facilitator and the other group members for best results.

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to

● Identify at least 3 criteria for effectively identifying suitable participants of system-involved youth who are grieving.

● Identify at least 2 essential skills that can be used for supporting grief group participants to access support and social connection with other group members.

● Identify 3 signs of potential overwhelm in system-involved group participants who are grieving.

Agenda

10:00-10:45am  Introductions, Class structure and Housekeeping

● The instructor introduces herself, describes the class process and housekeeping information

● Students will introduce selves, and respond to questions about their familiarity and experience with grief work with system-involved youth

10:45-11:45am  Laying the groundwork with interviews, and evaluating compatibility

● Collecting Information important to identify each youth’s grief situation

● Evaluating discussions, answers to questionnaires and utilizing nonverbal cues

● Questions to ascertain willingness and capacity to participate

● Reviewing contraindications for the appropriateness for a grief group

11:45am-12pm  Large group discussion

12:00-12:30pm  Lunch Break (CE hours will not be offered for this time)

12:30-1:30pm  Creating a safe structure for grief groups

● Discussion: Developing rapport within the group

● How to: Choosing tools and grief support activities

● Managing challenges: discomfort and overwhelm

1:30-2:15pm  Small Group breakout

● Using scenarios, identify where a problem dynamic or behavior could be redirected

● Recognizing and evaluating your own concerns to running a grief group successfully

2:15-2:30pm  Break (CE hours will not be offered for this time)

2:30-3:30pm  Large group discussion

● Challenges working with embodied grief activities

● Challenges working with intellectual, and emotional grief activities

3:30-3:45pm  Final Discussion/reflection in the large group

3:45-4:00pm  Wrap-up

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 (5.25) 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.