Foster Care Training

Many individuals working in the trauma field do not realize that working regularly with traumatized populations requires a continual reaffirmation of and commitment to evolving as a psychosocial and spiritual care provider. This is essential if individuals are going to have an effective and sustainable career working with and caring for traumatized individuals. This process of professional growth and commitment typically goes through a number of phases or stages that care providers are often unable master and move beyond without the help of peers, supervisors and/or mentors.

This workshop will examine what is involved in and required to successfully work through the major issues and challenges that all trauma care providers confront as they move further and further into the worlds and realities of a traumatized population and what the experiences of these populations suggest about the care-givers understandings of human beings, assorted social institutions and God.

Phases or Stages addressed will be:

• Learning to be genuinely moved by and have compassion for the distress and struggles of traumatized individuals.
• Overcoming numerous levels of social denial and collusion that minimize awareness of how prevalent and destructive traumatic events are and when addressed often minimize or conceal the shadow dimensions of human beings, social institutions and even entire societies.
• Making the commitment to continually acquire sound theoretical understandings of trauma, along with knowledge of how human beings are affected by a range of traumatic events, in complex ways and across all levels of individual and collective reality.
• Learning how to understand, assess and/or treat complex reactions to a range of traumatic events, which also means being willing to err on the side of believing the unbelievable and outrageous rather than minimizing and/or disbelieving what traumatized individuals share, as well as, not shutting down emotionally and intellectually when confronted with information that throws into question what caregivers know and believe.
• Regularly confronting and working with the impact of the caregiver’s own traumatic past, especially as it affects his/her personal and professional life. Ultimately this should mean allowing oneself to be affected by the deconstructive effect of another person’s traumatic experience. This also involves a commitment to regularly enter into, hold open and share spaces with other human beings that have had their identities and worldviews thrown into question, damaged or destroyed by the significance of a traumatic event or series of traumatic events.
• Developing a life philosophy and/or spirituality of trauma that allows caregivers to stand within liminal and deconstructed spaces (without shutting down emotionally, intellectually and spiritually) and/or prematurely leaving their professional field.
• Learning to mindfully accept that mainstream and consensual understandings of people and reality do not represent what is actually going on in the everyday social world, especially as opened up and revealed by the significance of another person’s experiences of trauma.