DAY 2: November 7, 2023

Workshop #5: Resilience & The Stress Response: Addressing Emotional Stuckness Including Trauma

PRESENTED BY Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D.

MORNING SESSION | 8:30am - 11:45am

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This session is available for live stream.

New understandings reveal that there is much wisdom to the stress response. Rather than focusing on dysfunction, we should begin by appreciating how our brains are brilliantly programmed to not only summon the strength required to deal with distressing situations, but to also serve as an emotional first-aid response. The problem is not with the stress response per se, but when the stress response is not followed in a timely fashion by its partner, the resilience response. We will be much more effective in our interaction with distressed children, youth, and students if we first come alongside how their brains are trying to take care of them, and from this stance, proceed to help the stress response become unstuck.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

• Updating an understanding of the stress response through the lenses of attachment and emotion

• The ability to differentiate between the two kinds of strength that is often associated with resilience

• An appreciation of what has to bounce back for emotional health and well-being

• An understanding of the wisdom of the stress response and how to come alongside it

Workshop #6: Making Sense of Today's Feeding & Eating Problems

PRESENTED BY Deborah MacNamara, Ph.D.

MORNING SESSION | 8:30am - 11:45am

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This session is available for live stream.

We have never known so much about food and what our bodies need to survive yet we continue to face increasing feeding and eating issues with our kids. What has come undone and what do we need to do to get back on track? What if it wasn’t just about food, or the table, or sitting beside each other to eat? We have missed something more critical to well-being that was meant to go along with eating. This issue couldn’t be more urgent with eating issues mounting in our kids and with children eating at least one meal away from home in the care of other adults. It is no longer about what happens at home with the responsibility for feeding our kids shared among many in a food obsessed context. Based on over ten years of research, Dr. Deborah MacNamara will share her findings based on her new book, Nourished: Connection, Food, and Caring for our Kids (and everyone else we love).

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

• Understand the connection between attachment issues and feeding problems

• Deconstruct the role of emotional defense in eating challenges

• Provide a developmental and relational lens on the roots of picky eating to eating disorders

• Provide relational and developmental strategies for making headway on eating and feeding issues

Workshop #7: The Vital Role of Emotional Playgrounds in Flourishing: From Toddlerhood To Elderhood

PRESENTED BY Tamara Strijack, M.A.

AFTERNOON SESSION | 12:45pm - 4:00pm

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This session is available for live stream.

Emotions need room to play, for their sake, for our sake, for everyone’s sake. Just as the brain has to sleep for optimal functioning, emotions need to play in order to do its work in moving us towards health and well-being. Fresh insights from developmental science reveal play as the care-taker of emotion and thus key to emotional health and well-being. What play can do for emotion is remarkable, providing safety for expression as well as acting as a sanctuary for feeling, a womb for adaptation, a hospital for healing, and a greenhouse for development. Once upon a time, the kind of play we needed was built in to our culture. Unfortunately, the wisdom of true play is becoming eclipsed today and therefore we are left to create what culture no longer provides. In this session, Tamara Strijack will guide us as we consider the emotional playgrounds that can best serve the emotional health and well-being of those in our care, as well as ourselves. It is never too late to invite emotions to come out and play, and never too early to put emotions into the hands of play.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

• Appreciating the role of emotion in our well-being

• Recognizing the signs and symptoms of emotional stuckness

• Making sense of the role of play when it comes to emotional expression and release

• Awareness of what gets in the way of healthy expression

• Recognizing when pivotal feelings are missing that need restoring

• Knowing how to create the conditions for emotion to move

Workshop #8: Shielding the Vulnerable: How to Protect Their Hearts & Minds

PRESENTED BY Eva de Gosztonyi, M.A.

AFTERNOON SESSION | 12:45pm - 4:00pm

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This session is available for live stream.

For those who spend their days interacting with the young, be it in schools, group homes, daycares and in our own homes, we sometimes forget how vulnerable they are. Developing beings are entirely dependent on the care of the more mature. Yet so many common practices we use, especially when behaviour is challenging, increase feelings of vulnerability and inadvertently lead to other unanticipated problems, including mental health issues. This session will focus on creating a better understanding of what our children need from us and on analyzing the pitfalls of some of our most commonly used interventions and interactions, including the use of praise, rewards, consequences, time outs, democratic or child-led practices, and self-regulation. The presentation will then provide alternatives to these, as well as encouraging adults to find ways to support children in the most important task of all, helping their emotions to move through.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

• Explain why at least three common practices increase vulnerability

• Improve their ability to increase child-adult attachment using strategies presented

• Describe ways to help children to stay out of trouble

• Improve their capacity for helping children to live fully with their emotions