Coursedescriptions

Course Descriptions

Congregation of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother

Third Order Regular of Saint Francis of Assisi

Franciscan Institute for Personal & Family Development

Palmiste, Vieux Fort, St. Lucia - Phone 758-454-3157 - Fax 758-454-3158

RC Church Compound, Main Road, Chaguanas, Trinidad, W.I. - Phone: (868) 671-8321 - Fax: (868) 734-7620

One-Day Seminars for Singles, Couples & Families

A one-day retreat begins at 9:00am and ends at 3:00pm.

Marriage and Mid-Life Challenges:

Find out when mid-life challenges hit both male and female. Learn to manage the risk and opportunities that mid-life offers.

Making and Maintaining Relationships:

This seminar is about self-disclosure, intimacy, relational hurt, forgiveness and celebrating love.

Mid-Life and Parenting Teenagers:

Education for parents who are struggling to navigate crossing two currents simultaneously. Parents helping their teens to cross the current into adolescence, while at the same time entering/approaching their own mid-life change.

Restoring Family Values:

This seminar will teach ways to strengthen the family. At the end of this seminar, families will be able to define values, clarify their particular family values and idenfity positive and negative behaviors that are necessary to have or avoid in order to live these values. It also addresses practical ways to communicate these values to children of different ages/stages of growth.

Forming Lasting Relationships:

A one-day communication seminar for single adults using the "five love languages," discerning if one is really in love, identifying the difference between love and infatuation, understanding the emotion network for manging conflict.

Befriending Your Anger:

This seminar will examine the physiological, psychological and behavioral aspects of anger. It will empower participants to manage their anger by teaching to identify the causes of anger, change anger-provoking thoughts, stop blaming and illustrate the power of regulating abusive impulses. It will teach ways to express anger in healthy and productive ways.

Enhancing Couples' Communication:

This workshop explores ways of listening more intimately, lessening stress in the relationship and building trust. It also addresses sexual communication.

Prayer and Our Bodies:

Focusing on the relationship between prayer and our bodies, this seminar will explore techniques that enhance the practice of mindfulness and stillness and present body-mind meditation styles that will enable participants to get in touch with their bodies and its vital rhythm. In addition to other benefits like becoming calm, relaxed and centered, healing touch will allow you to experience your own life energy in renewing ways.

Finding Hope in Mary: Reflections on our Lady of Sorrows:

This seminar will examine the seven sorrows of Mary and help participants to relate Mary's sorrows to their own suffering. It will also create a forum where prayer and reflection can lead to deeper faith, increased courage, comfort and strength.

Conflict Management:

This seminar will introduce participants to the princples of conflict management and enable them to appropriate and practice a variety of conflict management skills as they strive to manage conflict more effectively in their lives.

Family of Origin:

This seminar will explore the functional and dysfunctional dimensions of family systems. Participants will have the opportunity to examine their own family of origin story, in both its strengths and weaknesses, and its continuing influence in their lives. They will also learn to accept with gentleness and compassion the weaknesses and strengths of their own family.

Praying with Poetry and Art:

This workshop will explore the power of the verbal (and visual) icon as a vehicle for spiritual transport, renewal and healing. Participants will learn and experience the role of the imagination and the poetic word in opening the heart and mind to the presence of God in and around themselves.

Women in Scriptures (Old Testament):

This seminar will serve to highlight the lives of some of the women in the Old Testament and provide an opportunity for participants to identify with and learn from these women. It will also inform and deepen the religious faith of participants where appropriate.

Women in Scriptures (New Testament):

This seminar will serve to highlight the lives of some of the women in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospels. It will serve to inform and deepen the religious faith of participants while providing an opportunity for participants to identify with and learn from these women.

Healing the Father Wound:

The father-son relationship has a powerful ability on a child's ability to achieve and to love as an adult. This seminar takes you through a step-by-step process to heal your father-wound and will teach ways to release anger, unresolved longing and sadness. You will acquire the tools that your father should have given you such as personal autonomy and healthy boundaries. You will also be empowered to reclaim personal self esteem and create positive changes in your intimate relationships.

Healing Your Grief: Moving Beyond Loss:

Why do people suffer? How do we explain pain, loss and suffering in the world if indeed there is a God of love and mercy? Loss seems to put our entire life into a tailspin. Whether you have lost a loved one, a relationship, a marriage, a job, your health or a sense of well-being, it hurts. This retreat/workshop will help to restore hope. It will explore the spiritual, psychological, physical and cognitive dimensions of loss and grief. It will offer you a caring space to share with others your pain or give you a supportive environment to be quiet, while you learn some helpful coping skills.

Understanding Your Sexual Self:

This seminar will enable participants to come to a better understanding of their own sexuality. It will explore psycho-sexual integration as a process rather than an entity. It will teach that sexuality involves the whole person and is not merely confied to sexual intercourse.

Conflict Resolution for Couples:

Conflict is an inevitable part of life. Ths possibility for conflict exists everywhere, within families, between couples, in the workplace, etc. Conflicts are more than just debates, disagreements or negotiations. They are pointers of everyday competitions arising from individual differences which strain personal and interpersonal tranquility, or both. This 3-hour seminar has a two-fold purpose. The first purpose is to examine several major sources of conflict: anger, mistrust, underlying unmet needs and the responsibilty trap (too little or too much). In this seminar, you will learn to overcome conflicts through better communication. Finally, you will create a conflict style that will help you to better manage negative issues in your interpersonal relationships, thus, deescalating the potential for unmanageable conflicts.

Weekend & Weeklong Family Workshops/Retreats

A weekend retreat begins on Friday at 7:00pm and ends with Sunday noon lunch.

Celebrating the Family Workshop:

What does family mean to you? Spend this weekend exploring the language of love in your family. Experience the expression of love through art, storytelling and adventure.

Family Healing Retreat:

This retreat is an opportunity to put the past behind you; to embrace forgiveness and start building authentic relationships with your self, spouse and children. What to expect: for a weekend or a week, your family will pray together, sing together and join in family-centered activities, such as role play or skits, to empower communication, facilitate forgiveness and nurture commitment.

Creating Memories by Living Values:

How to have a conversation with your teenagers - moving from "normal" to dialogue.

Called to the Vocation of Family Life:

Learn the qualities and skills for strengthening the family. Content includes spirituality, teaching, modeling values, conflict resolution and techniques of keeping families together.

Family Communication: Road Map for Relationships:

Learn speaking and listening skills, the art of dialogue, how to build relationships rather than breaking them down, honesty in communication, and the ability to respectfully and assertively discuss problems, hurt and pain.

Workshops for Parents, Childcare Workers & Teachers

"De-Coding Sexual Con Games:"

Helping Children Recognize & Protect Themselves from Sexual Harassment and Abuse

Objectives:

- To teach children how to set appropriate healthy personal boundaries: to reach them to recognize "con language," to teach them how to identify emotional grooming tactics and to teach them healthy ways to express feelings.

- To teach participants how to recognize the signs of abuse, teach them the difference between inappropriate and appropriate sexual behaviour and to help them understand the reasons why children don't disclose. This empowers the participant to respond to disclosure appropriately.

In spite of parents' best efforts to educate and protect their children and identify sexual abuse behaviour, sexual abuse can happen. This workshop is to help all those who care for children and care about children to be able to prevent the next incident from occuring.

Workshops for Teachers & Educators

Success Strategies for Teachers and Educators:

Designed for teachers and principals, the purpose of this seminar is to provide a unique focus on what transpires in the classroom and school community. The focus is on issues such as organization, discipline and behaviour management and many other skills for both teacher and student growth.

Communicating with Children:

This seminar seeks to inform participants about the developmental needs of children and examine the appropriate ways to communicate with children at the different development stages.

Sowing Seeds for Succes:

This programme focuses on success in relationships, school, managing emotions and life. Students will develop communication skills, learn how to make a friend and be a friend, learn how to express emotions appropriately, build self-confidence and improve relationships. We seek to teach children to befriend themselves and learn practical coping skills. This workshop is for students, teachers and families.

Workshops for Students

Who Am I When No One is Looking:

This workshop is designed to empower students in developing a healthy self esteem and to help them understand the relationship between self confidence, competence and school success.

Understanding the 'Changing' Self and School Environment:

This workshop is designed to make the students aware of the various internal and external forces that shape the adolescent and influence their behaviour. It is structured to help the participants understand the transition from childhood into and through adolescence and the social changes in the environment that also impact on them.

Cold Stares and Warm Smiles:

This programme is designed to enable students to create within themselves and their school/community a way to a kinder, more cooperative culture. It will teach students how to turn ugly situations into opportunities for positive relationships. It is structured to show students how to tap into their inner power and wisdom to ease their conflict, talk out differences, stay calm, find common ground and create peace.

Getting Along with Difficult People and Situations:

As students interact with one another in the classroom, cafeteria, playground, bus and on the streets, conflicts are bound to arise. This is an expected and natural part of social interaction. Problems arise, though, when children are unable to resolve their conflicts peacefully, and more and more time is spent disciplining than teaching or learning. This programme is designed to teach students the necessary skills to become conflict managers. It will help students take responsibility for solving their problems while fostering respect for one another's feelings and points of view.

Only Pretending to be Tough:

Bullying is an issue in all sections of our community. It is a form of social dominance. It is a negative way of gaining social acceptance. To truly prevent bullying, we must begin with educating students about bullying and provide them with the skills to manage such behaviours.

Being Young and Being Wise:

Targeted toward the youth population, this seminar is meant to equip participants with the skills of career planning, interviewing, resume writing and a general framework for success in life after formal schooling.

Sowing Seeds for Succes:

Workshops for Other Professionals

Art Therapy:

Geared toward professional providers of mental and behavioural health services. This session explores how the art product is used in the therapeutic process.

Turning the Water into Wine:

This seminar is geared toward refocusing group leaders on the purpose of their ministry, inspire them to keep the flame alive, and to ignite the same in others. Participants will be trained in techniques of leadership, managing group dynamics and event planning.

Directed Retreats

A Directed Retreat is a silent retreat given on a one-one-basis, planned with and for you. It Includes a daily meeting with your director to reflect on your retreat experience and what is happening in your prayer; to receive guidance in ways to proceed and help in prayer and discernment. Scripture is the chief source of prayer (other sources may also be used). The needs of the individual are foremost. Each directed retreat is personally scheduled.

Silent Retreats

In this silent weekend, we will prayerfully look at how to be more fully present to the way that the Eucharist is the Center of our lives. We will ponder how we receive life from the Eucharist, so that we can be Eucharist for others.

We can also work with you collaboratively to develop a programme or retreat designed specifically for your needs that will help you create solutions.