AVAILABLE - PRE-RECORDED WEBINAR - pandemic and mindfulnESS

Workshop Summary / Outline

This workshop offers professionals new and uniquely powerful content to assist clients with unpacking the emotions and trauma of a pandemic experience. This will provide the practitioner with new resources, perspectives, and skills (many concrete takeaways) to help address what has been called the next pandemic, “the mental health pandemic.”

We will explore the impact of living in a new reality – a pandemic experience. This new reality is that the threat of a virus can be present almost any time, any place, anywhere. As a result, the individual (be it client, patient, or practitioner) is subject to contracting it, leaving their safety and well-being at risk. 

Subsequently, there is a plethora of challenges over a wide spectrum of society that impacts most any individual on a mental and emotional level, many of whom may or may not be conscious of it at any given moment. 

NOTE: There will be a number of exercises throughout the presentation to assist with integrating the content. 

This presentation includes an extensive digital manual - all PowerPoint slides, practitioner manual and client handouts.

1 - This presentation will explore in some detail the mental/emotional challenges related to various pandemic issues such as: 

• Being in quarantine – isolation and boredom 
• Racial and ethnic injustice
• The impact on education: parent-teacher-student-school social worker experience
• The challenges to frontline workers
• The impact of a friend or family member contracting the virus
• The feelings/emotions that arise when simply leaving the home
• Employment
• Grief

2 - This presentation will integrate basic mindfulness, as well as unique mindfulness skills to assist in addressing pandemic issues. This will include:

• Learning to be the Observer of mental content, as well Observe emotional content.
• This enables the client to acknowledge negative content while not taking it personally and becoming stuck in it.
• Introduce concrete skills to address intense emotional content
• Introduce and guide participants in various types of breathing techniques
• Skills to assist in addressing and alleviating some of the mental and emotional impact related to a pandemic.
• Expose habits of the mind that don’t support us.
• Introducing the “The Five Primary Powers” as means to assist clients with establishing a firm foundation of practicing mindfulness.

3 - Exploration of the impact of secondary trauma on clinicians and the mental and emotional byproducts of this, along with suggestions for self-care.

4 - Investigate more thoroughly the “core” underlying issues are in relation to the stress of pandemic issues and go beyond the symptoms. 

5 - Pandemic fatigue and its source will be examined; as well as, investigate and address mental and emotional content underlying the fatigue itself.

• The investigation will include unique perspectives and approaches on how to deal with pandemic fatigue.

6 - Included throughout the presentation is an examination of how the individual is being “triggered” mentally and emotionally by the presence of a virus or by the pandemic experience itself. This will include:

• How these triggers correlate to an individual’s past childhood pain and/or trauma.
• Review of  the CDC’s six guiding principles of trauma informed care in relation to these triggers.

7 - Using the pandemic as a springboard, this unique content will assist the practitioner with uncovering and identifying the client’s deeper therapeutic issues. We will explore:

• A detailed look at the use of Defense Mechanisms that are being used to an individual’s detriment. While these same defense mechanisms have a definite short term benefit, they also contribute to having long term adverse effects. 
• A “Simplified Approach to Therapeutic Issues” will be introduced to assist the clinician in helping the client move through pandemic issues. 
• A “Composite Picture of Pain” will include “The Four Primary Therapeutic Issues” clients face. 
• In addition, a “Diagram/Chart of Painful Emotions” will be utilized to provide the client with a better visual understanding of their “buried” emotional content.

PLEASE NOTE:

Full disclosure: The examination of this content will involve looking more deeply into the deeper issues of a pandemic on a mental and emotional level, as well the its’ aftereffects. Therefore, the content being presented has the potential to trigger an individual’s history of trauma. The participant should consider the potential challenges or risks involved in this type of content BEFORE registering for this workshop. 

If you have questions regarding the content, please contact David directly at 440-708-8028.