Workshop Summary and Objectives

Specific Goals

Workshop Agenda


Workshop Summary and Objectives
One-to-Two-Day for Professionals
(The two-day version provides greater detail on clinical techniques and more time for case discussions)

This workshop challenges professionals working with children, youth and families labelled ‘dangerous,’ ‘deviant,’ ‘delinquent’ and ‘disordered’ to better understand problem behaviours. Based on research with high-risk young people around the world, a culturally sensitive model of intervention that nurtures young people’s 'hidden resilience' will be presented. While we commonly think of resilience as an individual’s capacity to ‘beat the odds’ and overcome great adversity, this workshop focuses on how mental health professionals and human service providers can ‘change the odds’ to make resilience more likely to occur. An integrative strengths-based model of practice will be discussed and its application in child welfare, mental health, education and correctional settings explored. Using interactive exercises, clinical transcripts and video recordings of work with children and families, Dr. Ungar will show how this model of practice helps professionals discover the pathways to resilience people use to survive and thrive. This culturally-sensitive approach avoids the 'resistance' commonly found when those intervening label and stigmatize those they are trying to help. This workshop both explores this model of treatment and gives participants an opportunity to discuss the most challenging children, youth and families with whom they work.

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Specific Goals

1. Understand how 'problem' individuals use their behaviours to enhance their resilience and well-being across cultures and contexts;

2. Become familiar with the principles of an engaging strengths-based model of individual and family intervention (that includes elements of solution-focused, postmodern/constructionist, and ecological therapeutic techniques) suitable for work in multiple service settings;

3. Explore and apply a model of practice which helps clinicians, families and communities identify and build upon unconventional patterns of coping;

4. Develop a strategy for working without resistance with different types of hard-to-reach individuals and families, based on examples drawn from participants’ own practice

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Workshop Agenda

AM

• Defining resilience

• Protective processes against risk: Creative solutions to complex problems in poorly resourced environments

• Building resilience across contexts (race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, culture, geography) and the challenges each presents

PM

• A three-part model of intervention to promote resilience: Reflecting, Challenging and Defining

• Case discussion (from audience)

• Principles of intervention

• Working within systems and with our colleagues: Promoting a strengths perspective while avoiding burnout

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