course »Transformative Storytelling: An Expressive Arts Approach to Re-scripting Trauma Narratives for Child Welfare Professionals (Training Series: Part 3 of 4)

Date: 12/8/2021, 9:15 am—1:15 pm
County: -Training Offerings
CEUs: 4
Location: DISTANCE LEARNING
Sponsor: A Better Way, Inc.
Phone: 510-601-0203
Virtual Instructor Led Training

We are a people, a nation laboring under the chaos of a global pandemic, socio-historic, political, and economic insecurities, and isolation. Personal and political upheavals play havoc, ofttimes resulting in pervasive multidimensional trauma to our senses of human interconnectedness. Everyone has an individual, familial, ancestral and socio-historic story, and when uncovered and shared, their worldviews and associated behavioral choices begin to make perfect sense.

Storytelling is the warp and weft of the tapestries of life, and the unfolding of the collective narration of a people. Transformative storytelling is a creative narration designed to uncover, discover and reformulate the significance of one’s life experiences. It is the connective tissue in relationships with self and others. Radical transformative storytelling is a creative, ethnoautobiographical approach with the goals of profound self-presence and reclamation of the authentic self and psyche… within the social, political and cultural context of the times. Expressive arts are creative and visionary languages of the heart that can help facilitate self-reflective insight and promote capacious human interconnectedness.

In this series, we will examine the impact of trauma on the development of the self in relationship to life goals, hope, resiliency, and persistence and how this relates to the system-involved youth we serve as well as ourselves. We will learn and practice an expressive arts process of radical presentation of self in the telling of one’s one story, with applicability to our work with traumatized youth and families in the child welfare system, and we will explore creative and cognitive means of retelling the trauma narrative towards positive life outcomes.

This is a two-day course divided into four sections. Participants are encouraged to complete the entire series to avoid a truncated experience. Other dates are: November 10th, December 8th, and January 12th. Please register for these sections as well.