Foster Care Training

Training Series Topics and Descriptions

This course series begins with a highly experiential immersion in self-care, while laying out frameworks for understanding stress, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue. It will be focused on the experience of self-care and deep restoration for recovery of resilience at the level of the nervous system. We’ll examine frameworks for beginning to think about the physical, psychological, and spiritual impacts of our work on our wellbeing. We’ll examine the physiology of stress, look at indicators of autonomic nervous system function/ dysfunction, and practice a wide variety of techniques for supporting the relaxation response, working specifically with thoughts, emotions, and sensations in the body. Over time, participants will develop a clear map of their own priorities for self-care and the approaches that best support these priorities. As participants practice and gain familiarity with this awareness-based approach to wellbeing, we will begin to explore utilizing elements of this framework with clients to support their needs. Sessions are highly experiential, and you should feel different and better by the end of each session, gradually developing a toolbox of practices and new habits around resilience to support you generally in your life, as well as in particular moments of stress and challenge.

The six session series will address the following:

1. Self-Care and Resilience We’ll explore why the stress response just happens, while the relaxation response needs to be cultivated.
2. Vicarious Trauma / Compassion Fatigue We’ll define vicarious trauma, then look at strategies for coping with, and transforming it.
3. Applying Mindfulness We’ll define mindfulness, and explore how applying it can change our moment-to-moment experience of our work (and our lives.)
4. Working with Emotion and Empathy We’ll explore the role that unconscious emotion, feeling, and sensation play in shaping our experience, and discover tools for attaining greater emotional balance.
5. Habit Change / Neuroplasticity We’ll examine the neurobiology of habit-formation, and practice changing self-care habits long-term, after a stressful day at work, and in-the-moment of crisis.
6. Teaching awareness-based practices to clients We will learn and practice foundational tools for introducing mindful awareness to clients.