New Exploring Recovery Skills and Capacity Building Training set!

Exploring Recovery Skills and Capacities Training presents some introductory concepts and is followed later in the Peer Support training cycle by Building Recovery Skills and Capacities.

Participants explore some common experiences encountered in seeking to change unhelpful emotional patterns, and explore together some specific recovery skills. Particpants use their own experiences to provide the context for skill building explorations.

This training grew out of the participant evaluations of the more intensive Building Recovery Skills and Capacity Training, when it was first held in 2010. Exploring Recovery Skills and Capacities is a more accessible class for people ready to begin exploring their own, individual recovery skill building needs.

An overview of the development of Recovery Skills and Capacity Building Training

Our first-ever Recovery Skills and Capacity Building Training was propvided in 2010 and resulting in the intergration of the training into the Peer Support training series.

      We had a very successful first-time recovery skills building training in the fall of 2010.   Some participants continued to meet to support each other, and to helped us develop the "Exploring Recovery Skills" training as a more accessible, beginning class that helps people explore their own mental health recovery journey and begin using various tools that may help.   On the more advanced side of the training continuum, the group also helped us develop a Leadership Acadamy.   This academy was first presented earlier this year. It provides a way to prepare people (with lived experience of severe emotional difficulties) to work in the mental health field and/or to be more effective change agents supporting the kinds of system transformation nearly everyone in the field says they want.

Building Recovery Skills and Capacity Training Overview:

      This second Recovery Skills Building training is an opportunity for people to develop an individualized mental health recovery plan, and get support for implementing it. The last in our four part Peer Support Training series, ths training helps participants to develop and engage their own recovery plan, especially by reaching out to others who would support them.   After creating their own recovery plan, and a group of supporters to help review the plan, in the last session, participants then re-write their personal recovery plan, based on the feedback and support they've received.   The idea is that the training will give participants a chance to get personal experience creating their own, individualized plan, experience in working to get support from others, (both regarding their plan and in carrying it out), and then,lastly, experience making adjustments in their plan.   It is hoped that as a result, this full-circle experience could then could be repeated as the participant continues to build the recovery skills and capacities they think they most need at each stage of their own recovery process.

      In order to take the Buliding Recovery Skills and Capacity Training, you will need to get a staff member, at either Interlink or any other related agency, to agree to support you in taking the training.   The staff person's role would be to help you figure out how you can find other people who would help support you by reviewing the recovery plan you create.  The staff person, and then the other people you ask for help as part of the training, will receive written guidelines explaining their role.  They are helpers, but you are the person that works on your personal recovery journey.  They support you by offering their own ideas, telling you where they think you've got some good ideas of your own, and by pointing out the strengths they see that you bring to your recovery work.

If you have questions, or would like to talk about this training, please contact Kevin Murphy or Sean Kelson at Intelink Self Help Center at (707) 546-4481. You may also call to get our e-mail address, if you like.