Foster Care Training

Our ability to express emotions and access our true authentic feelings is rooted in our cultural upbringing, our general socialization with regards to gender and can differ greatly in the context of our personal and professional lives. A common socialized behavior is to suppress or mask our feelings, or more commonly, to make substitutions.

This workshop provides participants with a model for emotional literacy in which the importance of an accurate awareness of our feelings is stressed. We will explore how early childhood messages can limit our range of emotions and thus our responses to our emotions, resulting in unhelpful or undesirable outcomes. The Feelings Wheel by Gloria Wilcox will provide a foundation for exploring the 6 core feelings (joyful, peaceful, powerful, mad, sad, scared) and even more specific vocabulary to describe a range of emotions. We will examine how to access our feelings and name the internal messages that help us cope with and deal directly with what we’re experiencing, particularly as it serves as an antidote to oppression. Providers and caregivers in the child welfare or probation systems can apply these emotional literary skills to their work with youth and families.