debor016

Melissa is depressed. She has begun hurting herself and has made a suicide attempt, for which she was hospitalized. Furthermore, she talks constantly about how unhappy she is. When asked about her day, she says it was horrible. She has difficulty participating in events. She looks sad all the time. Melissa says that her depression is biological and there is nothing that can be done about it. JoAnne, Melissa’s mother, is very concerned about her. When she visits her she asks Melissa constantly abbot her depression and her symptoms, trying to push Melissa to do something about her mood and start functioning again. Melissa is in a treatment center to which she was admitted following her hospitalization for her suicide attempt. The team is very caring and compassionate, and they feel Melissa’s sadness. They are frustrated because nothing that they are doing seems to be helping. She is not getting better. Another troubling thing is that they do not understand why Melissa is so depressed any...

Here are a few more training modules to use in staff meetings. These are meant to supplement more formal training, not to introduce new concepts. They are designed to be used in existing forums such as staff meetings or treatment teams. Feelings skills Adapted from Risking Connection® Teaching Objectives: 1.     Understand what feeling skills are 2.     Understand that they are learned 3.     Develop strategies to teach them   Leader: Children learn feelings skills through attached relationships with care givers. All the thousands of times things go wrong (a child falls and hurts his knee) and the caretaker intervenes (here, I’ll kiss it and make it better) the caretaker is teaching the child something (love heals). Caretakers teach children to use connections, to feel they are worthwhile, and to identify, use and manage emotions. Our children have had inadequate care taking and multiple caretakers. Often their caretakers have been to...

In any sort of treatment setting, time is impossible to find. In a congregate care or school setting, someone has to watch the kids. In outpatient, there are those ever present billable hours to accumulate. Therefore, bringing staff together for formal training is often very difficult. And there are many demands on what little training time we have. So I developed these short exercises to teach one concept at a time. They are designed to be used in existing meetings such as treatment teams or staff meetings. They are designed to refresh or reinforce the concepts, not to be the main training vehicle. They provide guidelines for short team discussions of the ideas that support trauma informed care. I thought I’d share a few here and more over the coming weeks. As you can see, the format is that the Leader introduces the topic, there is an exercise with questions, and then there is a summary. Each exercise should take around 10 minutes or so. If you use any of these exercises in your staf...