Consultations

At Magestro & Associates, we work with challenges that so many people struggle with privately. They feel like they are the only one’s experiencing these challenges, and they are not.

Clients who call us love their kids. They are trying very hard to do right by their family but are confused about what to do. They feel like they’ve tried everything and nothing has worked. However, sometimes the youth’s issues have little to do with the clients and instead come from outside influences.

We step in when people feel like their lives are imploding and provide tools that are unique to this field to be implemented individually or with a loved one. We teach youth & families to “self-de-escalate” using Anger Wheels. We also determine patterns of angry interactions and analyze gradations.

We work in partnership between Parents, Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Neighbors, and Professionals such as Teachers, Counselors, Doctors, Nurses, Attorneys, Judges, Law Enforcement, and Social Workers. Families may include mother and father raising the child, one parent raising the child, blended families, grandparent raising grandchildren, and a multitude of other scenarios.

Can You Identify With Some of These Common Scenarios

  • “My child is at the fork of the road and I’m afraid they are about to walk down the bad path.”
  • “I’m afraid of child. He is abusive, threatening me. I’m embarrassed to admit that to anyone.”
  • “My adult child has graduated but won’t look for a job help around the house. He sleeps all day, plays video games, and is totally not engaged with the family” (Failure to Launch)
  • "My child is a victim of cyberbullying. I’m afraid what they might do.”
  • "My child is posting dangerous photos and threatening comments on their social media”
  • “My child’s behavior is changing and I can’t figure out why. I’m worried”
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Conferences and Professional Trainings

At Magestro & Associates, LLC, we provide conferences and training programs for professionals worldwide. Our company strives to help them better work with youth and families dealing with trauma, anger, and other high-risk behaviors through tackling different topics.

RAGING FROM WITHIN: DE‑ESCALATING ANGRY YOUTH AND ADULTS

In this seminar, we discuss why there is more anger in youth and adults today and where their rage originates. We provide strategies and tools to de-escalate and identify patterns of anger. Our experts also teach what to look for in oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder. We also present techniques you can implement in turning behaviors and talk about angry people’s lack of motivation or failure to launch.

Our consultants help you identify what this situation looks like, how it happens, and why it is kept a secret. We also cover the concern of whether there is an increase in the number of parents afraid of their children and why there is a rise in young people harming their elders. Our experts even educate you on what to do when a parent comes to you about their violent teen at home.

In this part of the discussion, we help professionals and young people determine the signs of dating abuse. Our consultants teach parents what they can do to prevent their children from experiencing dating violence. We present ways on how we can teach the youth about the stages of dating abuse and how to get a victim out of an escalating violent situation. Our team also offers approaches to telling teens how to help their friends involved in an abusive relationship.

Our experts assist you in learning to identify “lack of reality” and how to work with a young person or parent who appears detached. We also teach you how to use the Anger Wheel through a simulation experience and gradate anger to determine patterns of responses to anger.

This tool allows individuals and small groups to communicate and organize the many facets and layers of anger and rage. It lets the user de-escalate themselves and others. The Anger Wheel is presently implemented across the United States by:

  • Children of Incarcerated Parents
  • School Districts, Classroom Teachers, and Counselors to Students
  • Parents With Children Diagnosed With Autism
  • Parents With At-Risk Youth

Gradations of Anger: This is a tool that allows professionals to explore patterns of anger.
Reality Visualization: A strategy and tool, this teach youth and adults how to de-escalate anger. This concept uses a copy of visualization and breathing techniques.
Recipe for Disaster: We provide a template for professionals to analyze and communicate detailed and observable behaviors.
Sue: We offer strategies and tools to move forward from the effects of trauma to youth, families, and frontliners. Our consultants provide a template to record and share behavioral observations with wrap around professionals in the youth’s or family’s life.

Voices of Children of Incarcerated Parents

In this conference, we cover a variety of topics, including:

  • Inter-Generational Incarceration: How To Stop It
  • Considerations for Families Concerned About Parental Incarceration
  • The Relationship I Have With My Child Today
  • Through My Child’s Eyes
  • No Matter Where I Am, I Am Still the Parent
  • Understanding My Child’s Anger
  • Making Initial Contact
  • In My Child’s Life, Where Do I Fit In?
  • Resiliency: Helping My Child Overcome Adversity
  • Reintegrating Incarcerated Parent Back Into the New Family After Re-Entry, How Will That Look?
  • Disappointment Is Inevitable
  • Implementing the Change for Re-Entry
  • How To Get a Child or Teen Ready for a Visit to a Prison To See Their Parent
  • Impacts of the Parent’s Release on Their Child
  • Realities the Parent Will Return to Jail
  • A Youth’s Lack of Respect Towards Authority and Law Enforcement as a Result of Their Parent’s Incarceration
  • Ways To Address the Fear Each Family Member Has About How To Reconnect (Initial Contact After Estrangement and When You Walk in the Door the First Time)
  • How a Newly Released or Incarcerated Parent Can Navigate Through Their Child’s Anger, Even if Their Child Is an Adult Upon Their Release
  • Approaches a Newly Released Parent Can Do To Accept That Another Man Is Stepping Into the Father Role, Either As Step-Father or Boyfriend
  • Subjects an Incarcerated Parent and Child Can Talk About During the Visit
  • Purpose of the Visit for the Child and the Adult
  • Should Conversations Be Based on Reality vs. Keeping Things Calm
  • The “Happy Always Syndrome”
  • The Child’s Feelings
  • Current Happenings in the Child’s Life
  • Answering the Child’s Questions (Ex. Are You Going To Use Drugs Again?)
  • Many of the Children Are Angry: Imploding or Exploding
  • Teaching Children Everyone Gets Angry, It’s How We Handle Anger That Will Set Us Apart
  • Growing Up With an Incarcerated Parent
  • People Who the Children Can De-Brief With After the Visit
  • What Will Adults Think of Me When They Know My Parent Is in Prison?
  • What Will My Peers Think of Me When They Know My Parent Is in Prison?
  • Will Other Parents Let Their Kids Play With Me?
  • Understanding Anger

Moving Forward: Effects of Trauma and Mental Health on Youth and Families

Our consultants discuss the following topics in this seminar:

  • How To Walk Alongside Youth and Families Experiencing Chronic, Complex, or Generational Trauma
  • Exploration of Types of Trauma
  • Somatization and Ways To Address This
  • How Trauma Presents Itself
  • Shifting How We Look at a Young Person With Trauma
  • Resiliency Overcoming Adversity
  • Strategies To Use With a Young One or an Adult in Trauma
  • Staying Connected During Trauma
  • Empowering Young People or Adults in Trauma
  • How To Set Up Safety Nets for a Person in Trauma
  • Turning Dreams Into Reality
  • Effects of Trauma on Behavior, Social Currency, Family Dynamics, and Academic Achievement With Youth in Trauma
  • Interventions for Youth and Adults in Trauma
  • Resiliency Strategies and Difficult Decision Making
  • Playing the Hand of Adversity and Vulnerability
  • Impact of Social Media and Cyber-Bullying on Youth

School violence: Averting the tragedy

In this forum, we help you:

  • Become familiar with the identifiable warning signs of potential violence in schools and learn varied strategies to take action to avert a tragedy
  • Explore strategies and methods of changing the trajectory of the domains of the youth’s life, thus reducing violence
  • Understand how to navigate lack of reality base, bullying, threat assessment, trauma, emotional stunting, and leakage
  • Obtain hands-on tools to determine patterns to de-escalate anger and build connectedness with youth who are isolated and privately imploding
  • Observe how a school shooter plots, escalates, and carries out their plot so tragedy can be averted
  • Review diaries, plans, and strategies used by school shooters from Columbine to the present

We will also talk about the following topics:

  • Paradigm Shift and Reality of Today’s Youth: Disconnectedness, Entitled, and Lack of Empathy
  • Effects of Social Media and Video Games as It Relates to School Shootings
  • Are Youth “Master Maskers” or Can Parents Gain Reality About Their Child?
  • Imploding Versus Exploding Behaviors and How to De-Escalate Both

Our Target Audiences

  • Educators
  • Counselors
  • Administrators
  • School and Hospital Nurses
  • Social Workers
  • Law Enforcement Officers
  • Fire Fighters
  • Licensed Professional Counselors
  • Therapists
  • Nurse Practitioners
  • Physician Assistants
  • Attorneys
  • Judges
  • Medical Community
  • Probation/Parole Officer
  • Correctional Officer
  • Other Professionals Working With High-Risk Youth and Their Families
  • Parents

Our Speaker

Susan Magestro has written and created more than 100 different professional training programs based on her unique experiences. As a criminologist, interventionist, and teacher, she understands the reality many high-risk youth and families face. Susan has walked alongside hundreds of people as they navigate troubled waters and stays until they have made it to the other side.

The powerful strategies developed by Criminologist and Interventionist Susan Magestro are intended for professionals (teachers, counselors, administrators, nurses, doctors, therapists, social workers, psychologists, mental health specialists, law enforcement and corrections officers, attorneys, and judges), parents, and young people. These strategies provide techniques and tools to de-escalate self and others. They also provide professionals and parents with comprehensive composites of the reality of high-risk situations rather than exploring isolated events or issues.

The Anger Wheel provides a conversation starter to be able to articulate what is deep within us yet have been unable to express. Raging from Within: De-Escalating Angry People offers a genuine and honest understanding of what is causing the increase of the rage we are seeing. The Doors of Anger offers a way to look at the accumulation of anger that continually builds.
Truncated Grief offers an explanations and solutions to those behaviors and situations that are least understood and oftentimes leads to intense rage. This is a type of unspoken, unresolved grief, that revolves around grieving those who are gone from us, but who not dead.
The Analysis to Avert Disaster is a tool to evaluate the reality of what is known and what is missing, exploring a person’s life (family, peers, school, mental health, trauma, religion, social media, and community); warning signs, threat assessment and lack of reality to get the most complete understanding to best avert a disaster.

Susan has used these tools and strategies in her work with high-risk youth, parents, and families at the “fork of the road,” averting school shootings, assaults, domestic violence, homicides, and in a multitude of other cases. Her popular community lecture, “Whose Running Your House?” offers humor and strategies as a way to deal with high-stress interactions with today’s youth and families.

While people are running away from rage and violence, Susan’s unique thirty-year career has evolved into one of running into the chaos; identifying and de-escalating rage, creating a circle of safety, and addressing the layers of trauma for those involved. The goal is always to ensure safety and avert tragedy. Susan’s consultations with families have included interventions and navigations with parents, youth encompassing the education, medical, legal, and mental health systems. Susan stabilizes rage and anger in high-risk situations with the goal of safety and the trajectory of a positive and productive future for youth and their families. Susan offers expertise in “the other domestic violence” with youth as abuser and parent as victim. It is her number one call out. “Parents believe they are the only family living with nightmare of youth violence in the home. It is more common than many fathom but it is a secret kept behind the door. Reaching out to me is one of the hardest calls parents makes. It is rewarding and an honor to be part of their positive change.”

Susan Magestro is a criminologist and interventionist, international speaker, author, university instructor, teacher, and consultant. Her expertise in the areas of rage and violence have spanned over thirty years, allowing her to develop techniques and strategies that she shares with professionals in the fields of education, counseling, social work, law enforcement and corrections, medicine, mental health, and law. Her work has taken her into schools, medical and mental health facilities, prisons, and into people’s homes. The core of her professional experience included working directly with young people and families struggling with rage, trauma, violence, mental health issues, bullying (both cyber and in-person), parental incarceration, and the other domestic violence (youth abuser/parent victim).

Susan has conducted over one hundred classes accredited by the Northwest Accreditation Commission of Colleges and Universities. She has keynoted and lectured internationally and throughout the United States. Susan works with adults and young people on some of the worst days of their lives.

“By learning how to understand and address anger and rage, we can be ladders of hope and conduits of change”.

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