Foster Care Training

Child welfare practitioners are continuously exposed to trauma and stress that can be internalised as secondary trauma and compassion fatigue, with debilitating consequences to their professional and personal well-being. If inculcated trauma is to be averted, providers must come to understand that they can neither give to the children and families they are charged to serve, nor themselves from an empty cup. Self-care / resilience development provide the recognizing of work-related trauma and offers a tending to its remediation through persistent practices of health and wellbeing care. Reclamation of Calmness, hope, and action. Here, we examine the possibilities of self and society as inseparably bonded in I am because you are philosophies, for when we are unambiguously connected, we tend to care for a resilient self within a contextual consciousness of communal relationships. We look at mind-body connections and routines of self-celebratory care so the whole of self can be present in service of traumatized families. In this two-part training, we will look at the development of the self, resilience and the inculcation of self care practices for child welfare professionals. The training will include defining trauma, recognizing the risks associated with the continuous exposure of clients’ trauma on the wellbeing of their support teams. The training will illumine the interplay of narrative identity and resilience on provider(caregiver) willingness and skillfulness to self-nurture. Participants will take away strategies for self-monitoring and self-soothing in the face of daily trauma exposure and potential workplace-overwhelm.