Speaker: Sinthia , Associate Therapist, New Star Family Justice Center
Please introduce yourself and tell us about your current role.
Sinthia : Hello, my name is Sinthia. I am an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, and I work in nonprofit organizations for general community mental health and domestic violence, as well as at an in-patient substance abuse and severe mental illness facility.
How are you using what you’ve learned in your everyday work with families and/or within your organization?
Sinthia : I have just finished the Parental Resilience webinar, and I found it really helpful, especially the examples that they gave regarding how to empower clients, parents. And also the videos that they gave, showing the many different ways that clients can take a moment to check in with themselves, to separate from chores, or for some stress and center themselves. I think those were very helpful, as well as ways that parents can be empowered and supported, and ways that their strengths can be focused on.
Please tell us about any specific success, improvement, or change your participation in CalTrin training helped you achieve and how.
Sinthia : Since I've just completed the training, I haven't had the chance to apply what I've learned just yet. But definitely something that will be a change is having materials to give to parents and other peers, like resources for people who are working with parents that can be shared with the clients, like the videos that I referenced. And also the different organizations like Butterfly (BTTT) and the Social Policy (CSSP) that can give me more spaces to get educated and to continue learning new ways of engaging clients and having them understand parental resilience and the importance of it. And also really like the way that the presenter asked questions at the beginning for, for example, one of the questions was asking, "OK, what do you think parental resilience would look like from the outside?" And then flipping it to, "What would it look like for the child?" "What would the child's experience to be?" I think that kind of questioning really caught my attention and that's something that I will be trying with my clients to, to help them have perspective and really understand the impact that it has on children.
Have you encouraged colleagues from your organization or other family-serving professionals to participate in CalTrin training? If yes, why?
Sinthia : I actually heard about CalTrin training from my clinical supervisor at one of the nonprofits that I work at and that clinical supervisor sent an email out to all of the staff sharing about CalTrin, that it's free resource and training that we have. But yes, I definitely will share about this training and about CalTrin with other of my colleagues, especially because I feel that compared to other trainings that I've done, there was a lot of concrete tangible things that I could take away from the training, which I really appreciate as well as the resources. I'm definitely going to keep attending all of them.
Is there anything else you would like to share with us?
Sinthia : I just wanted to say that I'm very grateful that CalTrin is providing these trainings free of cost because trainings can be very pricey, especially within MFT world. A lot of them can be difficult to access. So I really do appreciate this. And I think the presenter (Jessica Mattly) for this training, in particular, was very engaging the way that you ask questions and connected and heard from the people who are watching and all the viewers. It was a very good presentation.
