Foster Care Training

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.