Using Child Development Stages & Grief Processes to Promote Healthy Family Dynamics for System Involved Youth

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

Grief is an issue not unfamiliar to system involved youth. In this workshop, participants will learn about how many grief issues can manifest in the life of a system involved youth. We will then use those challenging experiences to help identify and support the youth’s coping strategies they previously developed and integrate them into a set of healthy grief reflection and communication tools to benefit themselves and their relationships with those they identify as family.

Learning Objectives

During this session, participants will

● Learn how to identify and leverage their own personal strengths and capabilities to enhance their grief support work with system involved youth and families

● Develop strategies for identifying and accommodating the unique grief needs and contexts of system involved youth within their families

● Explore ways to help youth build rapport with others and practice reflection skills.

Agenda 

10:30-11:00am  Instructor and Group introduces selves and share experiences they have had caring for system involved youth around grief

11:00-11:30am  Facilitated group discussion: Participants will learn to identify their own personal grief experiences and the positive and negative skill sets they helped them develop.

11:30-12:00pm  Teaching: Developmental stages in relation to grief and helpful ways to engage system involved youth at each stage.

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

12:15-1:00pm  Teaching: Practicing healthy family dynamics through grief activities

1:00-1:45pm  Group Discussion: Engaging adult caregivers in a youth’s grief process that respects family culture and goals.

1:45-2:00pm  Break (CEUs will not be offered for this time)

2:00-2:45pm  Final questions, reflections and group appreciations ritual

2:45-3:00pm  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 (4.0) 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.