Child Development Stages & the Grief Process-Developing & Promoting Healthy Family Dynamics for System Involved Youth

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

This training will teach training participants how to perform creative/artistic activities they can use to help system-involved-youth to process grief experiences and build stronger relationships with those around them. First, participants will learn about how a system-involved-youth’s developmental stage interacts with their processing of grief. Then, they will learn multiple activities that can be applied to helping system involved children process their grief and communicate their feelings.

Learning Objective

• Learn about the different models of grief and how stage of development influences how system involved youth engage in the grief process
• Use creative and artistic activities to help system involved youth process and articulate their feelings
• Practice leading a system involved youth through activities designed to facilitate personal safety, foster positive changes in family dynamics, and age appropriate coping strategies

Agenda 

12:30pm-12:55pm Instructor introduces self, Group introduces selves: Who are you? What work do you do? Relationship to grief?

12:55pm-1:10pm Teaching: Experiences with bereavement. Identifying safe space

1:10pm-1:30pm Large Group activity: Creating (Draw/marker/crayon) a safe space in grief discussions/engagements

1:30pm-1:45pm Teaching: Understanding grief, recognizing regression, and children's development.

1:45pm-2:05pm Break out exercise: Dramatic reading & response

2:05pm-2:20pm Break (CEUs will not be issued for this time)

2:20pm-2:40pm Teaching: Family dynamics and the changing roles in and after grief

2:40pm-3:00pm Breakout Activity: Read the scenario and write a dialog or script for how you might playfully integrate grief tasks into an engagement/activity with the child.

3:00pm-3:15pm Teaching: Family dynamics and the changing roles in and after grief

3:15pm-3:35pm Breakout Activity: the scenario and write a dialog or script for how you might playfully integrate grief tasks into an engagement/activity with the child.

3:35pm-4:05pm Discussion/reflection in large group

4:05pm-4:30pm Closing discussion and 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 (3.75) 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.