course »Modeling, Promoting, and Instilling Empathy: Strategies for Inoculating Suffering and Isolation with Youth in Foster Care

Date: 10/2/2018, 9:30 am—12:30 pm
County: Alameda County
CEUs: 3
Location: San Leandro
Sponsor: A Better Way, Inc.
Phone: 510-601-0203
The term “empathy” is used to describe a wide range of experiences. Generally speaking, empathy can be understood as the capacity to sense another’s emotional life in the moment, imagining what they might be thinking or feeling. Children learn and integrate their most salient affective experiences within a relational framework, from the outside in; self cannot exist without other. Empathy provided becomes both the capacities for self-empathy and empathy for others. It could be said that empathy is one of the cornerstones to a coherent sense of self that feels safely connected and grounded within the larger social community. Empathy skills can be recognized as having many therapeutic benefits, including but not limited to: increased pro-social behavior, increased self-regulation, decreased aggression, and increased resiliency.

In this training, participants will learn the neurophysiological basis of empathy, explore activities and techniques aimed at cultivating and instilling empathy as a resource in youth and the family systems that support them in efforts to reduce disconnection, isolation, and buffer vulnerability to the common mental health challenges that youth and families may often face.

This workshop, will involve a mix of theory and practice with an emphasis on somatic methods for increasing regulatory capacities and executive functioning in children. Participants will explore the impact of overwhelming experience (i.e. – trauma) on development and learning, and are invited to involve themselves in reflective case discussion, structured observations, exercises, and/or multi-media presentation.