Writing through the grief experience & creating positive memories with system involved youth

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

This class enables participants to assist system involved youth in recognizing the stages of their grieving process and to help them set realistic goals for themselves (regardless of goals set for them by others). Training participants will learn techniques for helping system involved youth avoid setback situations and promote their own healing through writing so that system involved youth can develop skills for creating positive memories which can improve their overall outlook and positive outcomes.

Learning Objective

• Engage the topic of grief with a developmentally accurate approach
• Teach three different writing styles useful for the grief expression of system involved youth
• Facilitate system involved youth recognizing goal memories they want to establish

Agenda 

10:00am-10:30am - Welcome, Introductions

10:30am- 10:55am - Grounding and Focusing Exercises

10:55am-11:30am - Teaching - Recognizing Grief processes from a developmental, cultural and spiritual perspective and setting realistic goals of system involved youth

11:30am-12:00pm - Teaching and practice - Introduction of 3 different writing styles useful for grief expression

12:00pm-12:30pm - Lunch break (CEUs will not be issued for this time)

12:30pm-1:50pm - Teaching, group practice and discussion - Managing verbal and behavioral challenges with kindness and skill and discussion of problem-solving challenges that system involved youth face around expressing feelings in their writing. Designing a conducive space for prompts, Ritual and Language

1:50pm-2:05 pm - Break (CEUs will not be issued for this time)

2:05pm-3:10pm - Assessing writing skills, interests, picking topics to approach and avoid

3:10pm-3:30pm - Final sharing and appreciations

3:30pm-4:00pm - Reflections, goals for further work and course 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 (5.25) 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.