Red Cross offers "Coping with Deployments" class

  • Published
  • By Barbara Wood
  • American Red Cross, Silicon Valley Chapter
San Jose, Calif. --  The Red Cross is offering a Coping with Deployments class for military members and their families. The free class is taught by actively licensed and specially trained Red Cross mental health professionals, who provide all needed materials for success.

The course was developed to assist military family members build coping strengths and provide positive emotional support for one another and to other military families.

Family members of the Reserve, National Guard and active duty service members, including spouses, older children, parents, siblings and significant others, as well as to military members who take it with their family. Veterans and their family members are also eligible.

The course includes a special focus on resilience, which is the ability to quickly recover from change or adversity by means of natural strengths, and by preparing and planning how to cope during stressful times.

The content builds on military family readiness guidance from all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, and bridges with military mental health education materials.

Participants receive a "Coping with Deployments: Psychological First Aid for Military Families" handbook that includes and expands upon the material covered during the course, and provides a useful resource and referral section.

The complete course is approximately 4 ½ hours in length. It can be divided into a 2 ½ hour adult module or a 2 hour children's module. The children's module teaches adults how to support children as a result of changes they may experience due to deployment of a family member.

The class can be taught for as few as six students and as many as 25 at one time.

Please contact Barbara Wood at 408-557-1000 or woodba@usa.redcross.org with any questions. For more course information please download a course flyer at http://www.129rqw.ang.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-100323-063.pdf or go to www.siliconvalley-redcross.org for a full list of class offerings.