Family Wellness

This program is designed to foster and maintain strong family relationships. By utilizing the strengths of the individual through education and discussion, this unique program not only unites the family, but also offers the important ingredients necessary to ensure that it stays that way. This is a five-day workshop that is available for on-site delivery in your community and it embraces the philosophy that two heads are better than one. The unique program helps families to get on track by providing them with the tools to further develop and maintain healthy family relationships. The workshop includes the involvement of both adults and youth and embraces a philosophy that enables the entire family unit to gain a better understanding of themselves through dialogue and realistic self-evaluation. The family-wellness workshop contains three components; the first deals with the adults in the family, the second with the youth. The third component brings the adults and children together, reuniting the family in a healthy environment by using a non-threatening approach and incorporating a resolution circle to resolve family differences that may arise in the future.

The adult component begins with an eye-opening videography that covers a variety of subject matter including early Native history in North America, the arrival of strangers on the continent, the introduction of alcohol and its damaging influences on the family and community unit and the general attack on Native culture via residential schools and family separations that have been so instrumental in the multi-generational impact on native families and their communities today. It's important for the whole family to understand why alcohol and other drugs are consumed to escape pain and how the cycle of addictions leads to family violence. To remove the obstacles in our path we must first understand how they got there. Then we have to learn how to handle them, how to hurdle them. To do this it is important to understand why we are in the situation we are in; how we got here and how we can improve our family by working together in unity.

The youth component of the workshop begins by covering much of the same material the rest of the family is learning to interpret. Damaging influences created over a long period of time are still having a major effect on people today. The youth component shows participants how to recognize and understand how these negative influences still affect our parents and our grandparents, and how we, as young people, are also caught up in the non-productiveness of it all. The component deals with getting the youth to first understand the issues that created the problems, then helping them come to terms with the situation by taking control of their lives, taking responsibility for their futures, and in the process becoming healthy role models in their communities.

On the final day the adults and the youth join together in a circle of respect, together they learn what the term 'non-functioning family' and ‘functioning family means’. They will also deal with subjects such as family violence, family roles and codependency, the family cycle of alcohol, separation, divorce and drug abuse. Most important, everyone learns how to bring an end the damaging cycle by opening the lines of communication and by utilizing kind words and good examples.