Mifrasim Institute is pleased to invite you to a four-session workshop on:
Promoting Resilience
as an Essential Component of Coping with Trauma:
Rational, Principles, and Methods
"You can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf"
John Kabat Zinn
January 18, February 1, 8 & 15
Thursdays, Between 1930 and 2100 – Israel Time Via ZOOM
In English- with automatic translation to Hebrew
Free Participation | Ling for registration and receiving materials
with
Prof. Craig Katz
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Medical Education, and Systems
Design and Global Health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City
Moderator: Mark Sherman
Medical psychologist, Mifrasim Institute for Psychotherapy Research and Training at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo and at Meuhedet Health Maintenance Organization (HMO)
Introduction:
Research and clinical experience show the importance of focusing on personal resilience alongside trauma work. Promoting resilience as a complementary process to trauma work, especially among those coping with mass trauma on a national scale, can help strengthen traits and behaviors that are the basis of a sense of competence and personal resilience (Bonanno, 2021)
In addition to its other benefits, resilience can also help maintain social relationships, allow you to stay committed to your values and aspirations, and protect yourself from being overwhelmed by negative thoughts or stories related to trauma (Benedeck & Wynn 2016).
Resilience training may help people with PTSD feel more hopeful and self-effective, which may contribute to their willingness to do homework and ways they can help themselves. Resilience issues that seem particularly appropriate as an adjunct to the treatment of PTSD include: (1) optimism, (2) relationship building, (3) cognitive skills (4) energy management (5) emotion regulation (6) post-traumatic growth. (Friedberg & Malefakis, 2018).
Resilience refers to a person's ability to cope with stress and crises and adapt to the new life circumstances caused by these situations. Resilient people are characterized by a sense of control over events in their lives, a sense of involvement and purpose in daily life, and flexibility in the ability to adapt to unexpected changes. The working assumption of this model is that it is possible to strengthen and improve the strength of a person's resilience. Moreover, strengthening mental resilience as part of the process of coping with trauma is an essential layer.
The resilience workshop series developed by the Mount Sinai Center for Stress, Resilience, and Personal Growth in New York City builds on more than 30 years of multidisciplinary research on factors that support psychological resilience, including what Mount Sinai faculty members learned from prisoners of war during the Vietnam War, rescue and recovery on September 11 workers, survivors of the 3/11 triple disaster in Japan, and health workers responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each session is dedicated to a given factor that has been proven in research to promote resilience and culminates in a series of actionable recommendations. These workshops are regularly offered to faculty, staff, students, and trainees at the Mount Sinai Health System. Workshops relate to the ten components of resilience that have been identified:
1. Realistic optimism
2. Coping with fear
3. Know and live according to your moral compass.
4. Turning to faith and spirituality
5. Establishing and nurturing a supportive social network - connection to other people
6. Finding role models of resilience
7. Maintaining physical well-being
8. Developing brain fitness
9. Applying cognitive and emotional flexibility to trauma and other challenges
10. Finding meaning and purpose
The model is an adaptation of Southwick, Charney, and DePierro's book, Resilience: The Science of Controlling Life's Biggest Challenges, now in its just published third edition. Professor Craig L. Katz, M.D., is the founder of Mount Sinai’s World Trade Center Mental Health Screening and Treatment Program for 9/11 responders and currently serves as special advisor to Mount Sinai’s Center for Stress, Resilience, and Personal Growth. He and Dr. Depierro have gained extensive experience in developing, facilitating, and researching the Resilience Workshops in various forms within the Center, Mount Sinai's program to address health care workers' and trainees’ mental health issues resulting from COVID-19 and other occupational stress.
The workshop
We are pleased to host Professor Katz for an introductory lecture and three workshops on resilience.
The purpose of the workshops is to expose Israeli caregivers to the value of resilience work alongside trauma work and to provide demonstrations and practical tools that will help patients recover after exposure to traumatic events since 10/7/23. The workshops are online and will include a group of 12 psychotherapists led by Dr. Katz who will model the resilience sessions while the rest of the participants will be able to watch and learn. The workshop will be accompanied by Hebrew subtitles.
1/18/24 19:30-21:00 Introductory Lecture
An introductory lecture in which he will review models of resilience and the importance of developing resilience alongside trauma processing. A review of all ten components of a resilience model developed and studied at Mount Sinai based on the Vietnam War, 9/11, COVID-19, and other tragedies.
2/1/24 19:30-21:00- Workshop 1: Social support & resilient role models
This workshop will focus on the importance of social support networks as a buffer against the impact of acute and chronic stress, together with identifying and learning from resilient role models.
2/8/24 19:30-21:00- Workshop 2: Coping with fears & actively coping.
This workshop will focus on the importance of coping, rather than avoiding, all kinds of scary situations and strategies to do so.
2/15/24 19:30-21:00 - Workshop 3: Meaning and purpose
This workshop reviews how individuals in stressful situations connect to a sense of meaning in their experiences, including a sense of connecting to something greater than themselves. Posttraumatic growth and spirituality and religious beliefs as a source of resilience will also be discussed.
lecturers:
Dr. Craig Katz is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Medical Education, and Systems Design and Global Health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, where he has served in various clinical and administrative positions since joining the faculty in 2000. Dr. Katz is currently a faculty advisor in the Department of Medical Education and is involved in a variety of educational activities involving medical and public health students. Professor Katz founded and directs the Mount Sinai World Mental Health Program, his interest in resilience grew out of his experience organizing and providing psychiatric services to disaster-affected communities since 1998 through an organization of which Dr. Katz was one of the founders, these efforts included organizing the psychiatric response to the September 11 events in New York, including the initiation of the program, managing the World Trade Center Mental Health Survey and Treatment Program for September 11 responders. He is currently the Special Advisor of the Center for Stress, Resilience and Personal Growth, Mount Sinai's overall program to address healthcare workers' mental health issues resulting from COVID-19. Dr. Katz's honors include the New York State Medical Association's 2022 David B. L. Meza, III, MD Award for Excellence in Emergency Preparedness and Disaster/Terrorism Response.
Mark Sherman - an expert on trauma, grief, and resilience in the last 15 years in Israel, a lecturer in five different courses within the Institute, and a district medical psychologist at Meuhedet Health Fund Northern District, with extensive experience in resilience workshops in organizations in Israel and abroad. He has trained and trained about 100 Ukrainian psychologists on PTSD prevention models, integrative tools for treating PTSD, and a model for increasing personal and community resilience in an experiential narrative approach during the war between Russia and Ukraine since April 2022.