Designing a Spiritual Care toolbox for teaching youth-in-care options in managing & monitoring stressful life responses

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

Both adults and youth-in-care’s developmental processes generate coping tools that can give great insights into some of the choices they can make today. As we enter the second year of the pandemic, and all of its stressors, it is an opportunity to teach these youth ways to evaluate and make healthy choices about which tools we'll continue to use (or borrow from a friend) to provide the best support to move forward. The workshop will teach you how to show them 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. The aim is to refine our insights and to use the best tool for the job.

Learning Objective

• Learn to identify youths’ multiple coping strategies for stress and understand how they are impacted by their environment, culture and changes in family structure.
• Facilitate supporting youth to recognize emotionally relevant personal strategies through the use of a creative and artistic activity.
• Practice spiritual assessment techniques for managing perspectives on coping with fear, isolation, and personal growth

Agenda 

1:30pm-1:40pm  Instructor introduce self, my professional and personal history with grief and education

1:40pm-2:00pm  Group introductions: What work do you do? How are you coping?

2:00pm- 2:20pm 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.

2:20pm-2:45pm 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.

2:45pm-3:00pm Group Activity: Participants will fill their toolbox using artistic visioning and colored pens

3:00pm-3:15pm Group Activity: Participants will use cultural support models to personalize and beautify their virtual toolbox

3:15pm-3:30pm Group discussion: What is the emotional impact of physically manifesting this exercise

3:30pm-4:00pm Teaching: Dealing with resistance, judgment and freeze responses to art. Creative problem solving and utilizing this activity with your work.

4:00pm-4:15pm Final questions and answers

4:15pm-4:30pm Summary of uses of this tool and class 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 craziness by stitching together all 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 (3.0) BBS CEUs for LCSWs and MFTs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences & is provided by Fred Finch Youth Center, CAMFT Provider #045295.