Art Heals: The Use of Creative Tools to Manage Anger

This training will focus on helping children and adolescents manage their anger using creative counseling techniques. Participants will explore and discuss the social and emotional challenges youth face with managing their anger and its resulting issues, such as oppositional defiant disorder. Through dynamic discussion and interactive arts-based activities, participants will understand how using creative arts-based tools allows the provider to address the issue from a multi-sensory perspective. Participants will enjoy being introduced to creative tools that engage children and youth's visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles. By the end of this training, participants will have a deeper understanding of how creative counseling strategies can teach compassion and build healthy connections with others.

Participants will:

• Define anger and the anger continuum.
• Recognize how using creative techniques helps make concepts like anger more concrete.
• Employ the use of art and creative approaches to address anger.
• Apply the appropriate strategies that will engage the senses and improve emotional regulation.
• Implement the use of creative techniques in existing systems-based programs.

About the trainer:

Stacey Billups, MSW, is licensed as an LMSW in New York State. She earned her Master of Social Work (MSW) at Howard University. Stacey knows firsthand the social-emotional experiences of being a child in the foster care system. Therefore, she made a personal commitment to working with children and youth who have experienced trauma. Her experience includes working in foster care and hospital settings and over twenty-five years as a school-based social worker.

Stacey specializes in the strengths-based approach to working with students and families, social skills training for children and adolescents, self-regulation strategies, behavior intervention planning, and utilizing creative arts to engage youth in the academic setting demands.

Stacey is a mother of two and a professional artist with a ten-year art studio practice. Stacey believes that marrying the creative arts with counseling has many benefits, including healing trauma, heightening self-awareness, developing social skills, and building community connections.

To be eligible for this training:

Participant must be staff, caregiver or volunteer working directly with foster, adoptive or probation involved children, youth and their families in Alameda, Solano, Mendocino, Lake, Contra Costa, Humboldt, Tuolumne and Calaveras only. ALL participants unless a caregiver/resource family must register with a work email address that can be verified; unless the participant is a caregiver. Participants outside of these areas aren't eligible.

Event Venue

Online