Grief is the process that occurs before people come to acceptance. It can be a painful experience involving many different feelings. Losses includes health issues, loss of a career, loss of relationships, an unborn child, and/orability or desire to have children. Experiencing loss and grieving may include physical, emotional, social, and spiritual responses. Grieving is essential for coming to terms with and processing the trauma and resultant losses. Trauma and its accompanying sense of loss may result in a terrible sense of disappointment and failure. Working with mental health professionals and other survivors can be extremely helpful in working through the grieving process. The grieving process involves acknowledgment and acceptance of loss. Psychotherapy is a process of “re-parenting” the inner child who may have had less than ideal caretaking. The neural connections in the brain can heal and change with new experiences.

This chapter presents an overview of the restorative justice movement in the twenty-first century. Restorative justice, on the other hand, offers a very different way of understanding and responding to crime. Instead of viewing the state as the primary victim of criminal acts and placing victims, offenders, and the community in passive roles, restorative justice recognizes crime as being directed against individual people. The values of restorative justice are also deeply rooted in the ancient principles of Judeo-Christian culture. A small and scattered group of community activists, justice system personnel, and a few scholars began to advocate, often independently of each other, for the implementation of restorative justice principles and a practice called victim-offender reconciliation (VORP) during the mid to late 1970s. Some proponents are hopeful that a restorative justice framework can be used to foster systemic change. Facilitation of restorative justice dialogues rests on the use of humanistic mediation.

This chapter describes some of the recent restorative justice innovations and research that substantiates their usefulness. It explores developments in the conceptualization of restorative justice based on emergence of new practices and reasons for the effectiveness of restorative justice as a movement and restorative dialogue as application. Chaos theory offers a better way to view the coincidental timeliness of the emergence of restorative justice as a deeper way of dealing with human conflict. The chapter reviews restorative justice practices that have opened up areas for future growth. Those practices include the use of restorative practices for student misconduct in institutions of higher education, the establishment of surrogate dialogue programs in prison settings between unrelated crime victims and offenders. They also include the creation of restorative justice initiatives for domestic violence and the development of methods for engagement between crime victims and members of defense teams who represent the accused offender.

This chapter focuses on informal caregiving among minority groups. It also focuses on context of caregiving and discuss the various specific challenges caregivers of minority older adults face. The chapter examines some of the specific caregiving interventions tailored for families of color and discuss the implications for practice, policy, and research. Medical advances and greater longevity point to healthier and longer lives for many, but both formal and informal caregiving remain a concern as individuals age and develop conditions that require care. Caregivers are often able to realize the positive aspects of caregiving when they are not struggling with financial or social support challenges. Despite the vast literature on caregiving in general, research pertaining to the needs and experiences of racial/ethnic minority older adults and their caregivers is limited, particularly for American Indians, Pacific Islanders, specific Asian American and Latino subgroups, and religious minorities groups such as Muslim Americans.

The inclusion of parents and family caregivers throughout the phases of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is essential for best treatment outcome with highly traumatized and internally disorganized children. Parental responses that create dysregulation in the child’s system also appear to be related to the parent’s capacity to reflect, represent and give meaning to the child’s internal world. This chapter shows a case that exemplifies how the caregiver’s activation of maladaptive neural systems perpetuates the child’s exposure to multiple and incongruent models of the self and other. Helping parents arrive at a deeper level of understanding of their parental role using the adaptive information processing (AIP) model, attachment theory, regulation theory and interpersonal neurobiology principals will create a solid foundation. The thermostat analogy is designed to assist parents in understanding their role as external psychobiological regulators of the child’s system.

The basic goals of phase one are to develop a working relationship and a therapeutic alliance and to determine if the level of expertise of the eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) clinician is adequate for the complexity of the case. Other goals are to develop a comprehensive treatment plan and case formulation. EMDR therapy was developed as a form of treatment to ameliorate and heal trauma. Clinicians working with complex trauma must have substantial understanding of the adaptive information processing (AIP) model and the EMDR methodology. During phase one, the clinician works on creating an atmosphere of trust and safety so a therapeutic alliance can be formed with the child and the caregivers. This chapter shows an example of how medical issues can affect the quality of the parent-child communications. The adult attachment interview (AAI) gives us the view of the presence of the experiences in the parent’s life.

This chapter lays the foundation for facilitative leadership from the unique social work perspective. Social work’s Code of Ethics and social work practice principles contribute to the value-based leadership that is part of the facilitative leader’s core. Among the important expectations of social work leadership are cultural sensitivity and competence. Five discussion areas have been selected as essential to facilitative leadership from a social work perspective: inclusion, strengths-based leadership, power and the difference between power over and power with, oppression and social justice, and the elusive but critically important concept of empowerment. There are different types of power and power relationships such as productive power and destructive power. Being conscious of privilege and oppression are precursors to understanding social injustice and working toward social justice. The social work program identifies social justice as a professional obligation of social workers to attempt to improve the quality of all people’s lives.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related cortical dementias are a major health problem. Patients with AD and related dementia have more hospital stays, have more skilled nursing home stays, and utilize more home health care visits compared to older adults without dementia. This chapter discusses the role of family caregivers and how they interact with in-home assistance, day care, assisted living, and nursing homes in the care of an individual with dementia. It also discuss important transitions in the trajectory of dementia care, including diagnosis, treatment decision making, home and day care issues, long-term care placement, and death. It highlights the importance of caregiver assessment, education, and intervention as part of the care process. Dementia caregivers are at risk of a variety of negative mental health consequences. Another important moderating variable for dementia caregiver distress is self-efficacy.

The work directed toward increasing the child’s ability to tolerate and regulate affect, so that the processing of traumatic material can be achieved, is initiated during the preparation phase. The process of providing the neural stimulation to improve the child’s capacity to bond, regulate, explore, and play should begin during the early phases of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. The Polyvagal theory presents a hierarchical model of the autonomic system. In complexly traumatized children, the development of this system has been compromised due to the early dysregulated and traumatizing interactions with their environments and caregivers. When describing the various forms of bilateral stimulation (BLS), go over the different options and practice with the child. If the child went through the calm-safe place protocol successfully, motivating the child to actually use it when facing environmental triggers is an important goal.