Foster Care Training

Mindfulness is a trending topic these days, but if not introduced skillfully, with an awareness of young people’s trauma history and nervous system state, it can be ineffective. In this training, we explore a trauma-informed approach to helping young people develop inner life skills- awareness of their inner worlds and the various dimensions of attention, self-awareness, body awareness, emotion regulation, and relational competence. The inner life skills curriculum is a safe, sequential, step-by-step introduction to mindful awareness and its various applications. We’ll begin with exploring foundations of mindful awareness, including developing a felt sense of safety, the distinction between the inner world and the outer world, and the concept of basic goodness. Then we’ll explore developing basic mindfulness- in other words, how to pay attention in a way that is intentional, centered in the present moment, and non-judgmental. We’ll then look at applying this mindful awareness to the body (somatic awareness), to emotions (emotional awareness), and to relationships. This training is highly experiential, and will give you the opportunity to practice various interventions for supporting young people, as well as key distinctions in how to use these tools with young people, where there is a trauma history.

Participants will learn:

• Important foundations/ pre-requisites for introducing mindful awareness to young people
• The benefits of working bottom-up, in addition to top-down, in the nervous system
• Why externally-oriented attention is often initially more supportive for young people with trauma history than internally-oriented attention
• How to actually teach young people to pay attention- something we often talk about but rarely break down into discrete steps that a young person can follow
• How to help young people understand and utilize the information presented by their sensations and emotions in decision-making