Self-Attuning: Tending to Emotional Activation
Healing our Own Wounds while Providing Care to Others
Orientation Session: March 14, 2024 • 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. PT/ 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. CT/ 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. ET
All Other Sessions: March 21 and 28 April 4, 11 and 18, 2024 • 3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. PT/ 5:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. CT/ 6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. ET
This event has ended.
- How might we might use our lived experience to positively inform the ways we lead through and amidst crisis?
- How might we increase self-awareness and inquiry into the therapeutic dynamics and situations that activate us?
- How might we be able to support our own emotional needs and healing to better support the therapeutic needs of our colleagues and the young people we serve?
What is this?
Join us in a six-session community of practice for school-based or connected service providers who want to engage in reflective inquiry around how the experiences we’ve lived through impact and inform our ability to provide responsive mental health services for others.
When is this?
- Orientation Session: March 14, 2024 • 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. PT/ 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. CT/ 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. ET
- All Other Sessions: March 21st and 28 April 4, 11 and 18, 2024 • 3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. PT/ 5:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. CT/ 6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. ET
UPCOMING SESSIONS AND THEMES:
- Opening to Our Emotions; Taking Honest and Compassionate Self Inventory of the Emotions We Feel Most
- March 14, 2024
- Guest Host: Shirley Johnson
- Befriending all of our Parts; Attuning and Attending to Emotional Activation through Internal Family Systems
- March 21, 2024
- Guest Host: Jen Leland
- Towards Renewal: Attuning and Attending to our Activated Responses amidst the Crises
- March 28, 2024
- Guest Host: Candice Valenzuela
- The Four Sacred Directions: Uplifting Traditional wisdom to Center our Mind, Body and Spirit through times of Activation
- April 4, 2024
- Guest Host: Jesus Solorio
- Honoring the Wisdom of Our Bodies: Attuning and Attending to our Somatic Experience through Crisis
- April 11, 2024
- Guest Host: Sue Kuyper
- Self and Collective Attuning: Integrating Ideas and Practices with our lived Experience
- April 18, 2024
- Host: Oriana Ides
Why is this necessary for crisis work?
Our ability to provide trauma-informed care and establish healthy therapeutic relationships are greatly predicated on where we are at in our own healing journey.
Without the space, support and tools to move beyond the harms of our own lived experience, it is quite possible that we lead with our own emotional interests rather than that of the greater good. Without acknowledging, reframing and healing our own hurts, as service providers, we run the risk of internalizing the behaviors and needs of others, miss important signs, operate from a compromised parasympathetic nervous system or find ourselves stuck in a self-defeating stress response such as fight, flight, freeze, fawn or countertransference.
These heavy and pivotal knowings require a brave space to examine, unpack and explore.
How might it feel?
Explore with SCRR and a roster of expert guest clinical supervisors the ways in which we might alchemize harmful accounts into emotionally corrective experiences for ourselves and our communities, promote our relational interdependence and cultivate the conditions within our school communities that allows us to be human AND boundaried.
Learning Goals for the Community of Practice
- Create a brave, generative, and regulating space for educators to explore the interconnection between lived experience and their current ability to uphold trauma informed engagement.
- Engage in community valued, trauma informed regulation strategies that positively impact the process of recovery and renewal.
- Imagine new ways of incorporating recovery and renewal activities into therapeutic intervention, classrooms and curriculum, peer and student interactions, meeting structures and personal lives.
- Identify individual and collective protective factors, community assets and stressors, significant loss, trauma and opportunities for growth
Intended Audience
- Anyone who tends to the wellbeing of young people in school settings (therapists/clinicians, case managers, mentors, life coaches, restorative justice coordinators, guidance counselors, social workers,etc.)
Lead Faculty
Oriana Ides (she/her), MA, LPCCI, PPS
SCRR Field Coach
Oriana Ides is the School Mental Health Training Specialist at CARS, who approaches healing the wounds of trauma and oppression as core elements of social justice. She has worked with young people across life course from elementary school to college, and has served as teacher-leader, school counselor, classroom educator and program director. She is committed to generating equity within school structures and policies by focusing on evidence-based mental health techniques and institutional design. Her work to forge a more just world is motivated by and dedicated to Amilca Ysabel Mouton Fuentes.
Guest Faculty
Candice Rose Valenzuela, MA, (they/them/she/her)
Candice believes that ancestral, community and ecological healing are the most urgent issues of our time. They coach systems leaders, offer 1:1 counseling and facilitate healing experiences at justice-oriented institutions throughout the nation. In her free time, Candice enjoys writing, painting and sharing their enthusiasm for nature with their 7-year child.
Jen Leland, MFT, (she/hers)
Jen has extensive background in community mental health and education programs, including leading trauma-informed special education and residential treatment and youth justice programs and directing multiple non-profit and county public health programs.
In 2015, Jen had great honor to become founding Director of Trauma Transformed Center. Having her own lived experiences in systems and more than 15 years in the public health field, she is humbled and driven by the vision that school communities can recover from crisis, structural and collective trauma in ways that lead to even more healing, loving, and just school communities for all students.
Jesus Solorio, LMFT (el/he/him)
Jesus Solorio (el, he, him) identifies as Xicano and was born and raised in Los Angeles (Tongva territory) by migrant parents from Michoacán (Purépecha territory), Jesus earned his Masters degree in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Community Mental Health from the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is the owner of the group private practice, Ollin Marriage & Family Therapy, Inc. Prior to that he has worked in various settings as a therapist, lead clinician, supervisor and program manager. These include Instituto Familiar de La Raza, La Familia Counseling Service, the Community Mental Health Certificate Program at City College of San Francisco and Kaiser Permanente. Jesus is a member of the Council of 13 for the Institute of Chicana/o/x Psychology and teaches in the Department of Counseling at San Francisco State University.
Jesus’ work is culturally responsive, rooted in social justice, trauma-informed, strength-based, and is strongly infused by an indigenous worldview and liberation psychology.
Jesus honors and recognizes his mentors and teachers along the way beginning with his mother and older sisters whom have taught him lessons in strength, resiliency, love and humility. As a therapist, his mentors include Maestra Concha Saucedo, Dr. Sal Nuñez and Tio Samuelin Martinez whom have all shown him what it’s like to work from a place of authenticity and love while anchoring in indigenous ways. He has apprenticed with Dr. Sal Nuñez in Medicinal Drumming Praxis and has been trained in Chicanx Affimative Therapy, EMDR, and Somatics and Trauma from Generative Somatics. He is a Mexica Mitotiani and Huehuetero (Mexica Dancer and Drummer) with Calpulli Nanahuatzin.
Shirley Johnson, LMFT (she/her)
Shirley Johnson is a licensed psychotherapist, energy & sound healer, budding herbalist, aspiring writer and retreat leader. She brings 13 years of teaching yoga and 15 years of studying indigenous healing technologies to her work as a clinician. As the daughter, niece, and granddaughter of public school educators, Shirley began her clinical practice with middle and high school aged students within school settings. From working within schools, she quickly identified the nuances of holding space for students, adults and herself and the ways that there seemed to be little space for emotions within working in school mental health. She brings a range of clinical experience rooted in psychodynamic and relationship theories, multiculturalism, and being a movement practitioner over the last 13 years. Shirley is passionate about supporting adults in the helping profession with releasing codependent behaviors, learning to take care of oneself, and humanizing themselves and each other. To learn more about Shirley’s work you can follow her on IG at @soulisticwellness or visit her website at www.soulisticwellness.com
Sue Kuyper, LCSW (she/her)
Sue Kuyper is a 50-something white queer bilingual (Spanish/English) 50-something politicized somatic healer and therapist, licensed clinical social worker and organizational consultant who has been working in crossroads of social movements, community-based organizations and healing for the past 30 years primarily in the Mission District in San Francisco, Oakland and Guatemala. During the years of 2001-2009, Sue worked with rural, urban and indigenous survivors of genocide and political repression in Guatemala. She offers an in-depth multicultural, international and multidisciplinary perspective with expertise in community worker vicarious trauma, transnational families, immigration trauma and transforming embodied whiteness. She is a single mother with co-parents of two multiracial young people who teach her to stay humble and committed to deep change every single day. Sue lives and works on unceded Chochenyo and Muwekma Ohlone homeland also known as Oakland, California.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is this program eligible for Continuing Education Hours (CEH)? Yes. 3 Continuing Education Hours will be available at no-cost for participation in all 6 sessions, and are offered for LCSW, MFT, LPCC, LEP, CCAPP & RN licenses.
- Will this offering be recorded? No
- Do I need to attend all four main sessions? Yes, and especially if you want to receive CEHs, but, it is not required.
- Who can I contact if I have additional questions? Email us at scrr [at] cars-rp.org with “Self-Attuning” in the subject line.
Resources on Attunement (priming for participants)
From the Field Regarding Self-Attunement
- RAIN, the Practice of Radical Compassion (Brach, 2020)
- The Power Of Attunement And Why It Is Important In Your Life [2022] | Diversity for Social Impact
- The Art of Attunement (Turning Point Therapy)
- What is Attunement? – Momentous Institute
- Why Is It Important to Be Emotionally Attuned to Yourself? – Creative Minds Psychotherapy
- Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (Levine, 1997)
- Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself (Tawwab, 2021)
- https://beam.community/wellness-tools/
- Relationship, Responsibility, and Regulation: Trauma-Invested Practices for Fostering Resilient Learners (Souers & Hall, 2018)
- Peace from Anxiety: Get Grounded, Build Resilience, and Stay Connected Amidst the Chaos (Khouri, 2018)
Testimonials
After attending the training in the Fall of 2023, participants shared what they took value in and planned to implement into their own workplaces:
“I work in a school setting providing mental health support to students and their families. My participation in this program has helped me expand on my knowledge to continue servicing my community. “
“I have lots of clients that have big emotions of anger so everything I learned will better support them.“
“The ways this program have benefited me and my organization are innumerable. I have been practicing regulating my responses to things happening and how I process the emotions I get from those things happening. I am beyond blessed to be able to share this space.“
“My participation in the SCRR program may benefit the broader school community because I will have a better understanding of mindfulness and being aware of my own social and emotional health.“