Foster Care Training

This course is designed for practitioners working with clients who would benefit from deepening their exploration around anger. Additionally, this course is also designed to support practitioners wanting to deepen their personal practice with their anger to support their work with system-involved families. Anger often has a reputation as an emotion that needs to be tempered and tamed, leaving it at risk of being repressed and avoided altogether. What if we shifted towards destigmatized frameworks that understand anger to be an emotional messenger that can take care of us by ways of being a survival response? We will identify the difference between anger and aggression, the degrees of anger, and find new pathways for reclaiming our anger. Together, we will explore the basic neuroscience of anger and anger’s function as a response to threat. We will learn about the health impacts of not only expressing anger but also repressing anger. In addition to emotional literacy, we will assess how our early childhood messages and socialization impact our and our clients’ emotional responses. How might our early experiences inform the ways we engage with substitution and masking of anger? In what ways is our understanding of anger gendered and racialized? Who is given permission to be angry and who may be ascribed anger? And what are the potential risks and outcomes of internalizing anger inward toward the self? Participants can expect to identify the ways that we cope with repressing anger, so that they may better identify when clients can benefit from this work. How might repressing anger show up in our communication, behavior, and habits? We will apply what we learn by practicing tools to work with anger, such as assertiveness, boundaries, and direct communication.