Stretching Trauma-informed Strategies: Yoga and Mindfulness for Children and Adolescents

6.5 contact hours are available for NYS, NJ and CT Licensed Social Workers

$250 single; $200 each for 5 or more

Alumni will receive a $50 discount. Please email swope@columbia.edu for promotional code. Your email should contain your name and the year you graduated.

REGISTER HERE.

Subject/Topic

Children experience all kinds of situations that impact their assumptions of safety in the world (and in their bodies): bullying, parental divorce, separation, an accident, or loss of a loved one. Any of these situations can become traumatic, producing anxiety, stress, and trouble functioning in everyday life—some of the top reasons why referrals for therapeutic support are made. And yet, children who experience traumatic stress are expected to perform, learn, and focus but often don’t have the tools they need to do so.

Yoga and mindfulness practices have been gaining momentum everywhere because they address this issue and fill the gap in what is missing in many schools, therapeutic practices, and parenting methods: a bottom-up approach to treatment and understanding of the child. Most approaches used today resort to talking and processing of information on a level of functioning that is not accessible when experiencing traumatic stress. Instead of starting with cognitively processing important emotions (such as grief, shame), yoga and mindfulness offer ways to address the body and sensations happening within (identifying sensations, triggers, feeling the internal self).

Workshop Description

This unique workshop integrates hands on and ready-to-use techniques with cutting-edge research about traumatic stress, the brain-body connection, and how yoga and mindfulness practices help to actually rewire the brain for healthier and more resilient functioning and reconnection.

You will walk away with the know-how to help children who experience anxiety, depression, profound stress and self-regulation difficulties to identify triggers, grow more self-aware, soothe their central nervous system, and feel greater overall safety and joy.

This workshop is equally accessible to practitioners with either many or no prior yoga and mindfulness experience. You’ll be equipped with the why and the how of implementing new skills into your work and interactions with children.

Learning Objectives

Participants will learn to:

• Describe trauma from a developmental, physiological, and psychological perspective.
• Recognize the signs, behaviors, and symptoms associated with traumatic stress in children.
• Know the effects of trauma on the brain-body connection, and how yoga and mindfulness helps to rewire the brain for healing, resilience, and growth.
• Implement trauma-informed yoga and mindfulness techniques and practices to support safety, awareness, and connection to self and others.
• Support children and adolescents in identifying triggers, soothing their nervous system, and awakening their capacity to make good choices.
• Identify how to respond to resistance when sharing yoga and mindfulness with children.
• Integrate skills into daily life and support parents in making the most of their bond together.

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Presenter 

Victoria Grinman,  LCSW-R is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, with over ten years of experience in a variety of settings, including a specialized non-public school, supporting children and adolescents with special needs, and their families, and other special populations. Victoria is the owner of Growing Kind Minds, a private practice that services children, adolescents, families and groups; and a platform to share resources, information and tools with parents, professionals and the community. She is an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of Social Work in NY, and a doctoral candidate at Adelphi University School of Social Work with research focus in trauma, post-traumatic growth, resilience, parenting and autism. Victoria holds a BA in Social Work and Psychology from Adelphi University in Garden City, NY and a MSW from Columbia University School of Social Work in NYC. She is a trained Yoga and Mindfulness Instructor to children and adolescents through Little Flower Yoga and a certified aroma-therapist through New York Institute of Aromatherapy.

Victoria has extensive experience providing individual, group and family therapeutic services to children and teens, utilizing an integrative approach that is informed by theory, and grounded in a holistic and strengths-based perspective. She is a national speaker, providing professional education to an interdisciplinary audience, and has been invited to be a speaker at universities and organizations on topics that span the areas of yoga and mindfulness, emotional literacy, education, clinical practice, parenting, disabilities, trauma and autism. She provides consultations in program development, and social-emotional curriculum building and implementation. Victoria participates annually in national and international conferences, speaking on trauma and post-traumatic growth.