With over 15 years of experience in the behavioral health industry, Eric Bowens comes to Favor and Grace Under Fire with lots of passion and knowledge in helping youth and families cope with challenges that effect many families today. Eric’s primary role at FGUF will be as a Behavioral Coach to kids and adolescents 8-17 years old, while providing services in homes and in office.

Eric has grown up in the behavioral health care world the vast majority of his life. Eric’s mom started taking in foster children who needed a home since his early childhood. Giving Eric almost 30 years of total experience. Eric has been a Juvenile corrections officer for the state of Arizona for years. And has worked his way up to one of the top staff in the state. To him, It was a very rewarding experience for him to help youth leave and become successful in their lives. Eric believes you can learn just as much from the youth you serve as much as you try to teach them. Whether it be directly or indirectly and the experiences can forge you to have better understanding, humility, and insight. Eric has been fortunate enough for a few former youth to reach back out to Eric as an adults and let him know they were thankful and are doing much better in life with their jobs and families. Eric has worked in multiple treatment centers such as Youth development institute for years with youth whose charges went violent offenders and to sexual offenders. Eric also worked in Youth Development Institute’s group homes also with youth who were on the verge of graduating their program with new attitudes towards life, new life skills and left successfully without returning. Eric has worked as a behavioral/life coach for years. Assisting youth and their families with developing better communication skills, life skills, improving skills in school life, and improving overall mental and emotional health.

Eric has worked with and still works with youth with Autism as a staff in Applied Behavioral Analysis for years.

Eric has a respectful, honest, calm, and positive approach. Eric is normally liked by youth because he is fun loving, open minded, encouraging yet respects proper boundaries and is willing to help meet individuals where they are at. Eric understands things should always be placed in their proper prospective and context to keep balance. Eric keeps a wide variety of youth he is willing to work with as well as adults if necessary as he has also done before. He understands success varies from person to person. He believes in meeting people where they are at and slowly developing and improving individuals organically towards those goals. Eric believes that teamwork makes the dream work. It takes the team, family, teachers, and more to help make a difference in the lives being served.

What is behavioral coaching? A behavioral coach helps families identify feasible goals to help a child succeed in behavior modification. To simply put it, the coach guides kids and families through difficult behaviors and challenging times and serves as a support while the youth and family members take responsibility to follow through with suggestions and techniques taught to help bring positive change.

On Eric’s time in behavioral health, he has been a personal witness to family change for the better when families address their communication, being honest, take personal accountability for their actions and follow through with the work given to meet a family’s unique goals. “Rarely is a child struggling with complex behaviors out of no where, it’s up to the family to be dedicated to help the child work through their challenges and at the same time, address and maybe re-arrange their own expectations for how a child should behave”. Eric lives by a code in behavioral health-“No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” Eric believes in being down to Earth yet bringing honesty, wisdom, strength of character and patience. Just leading people to a better version of themselves.

Eric looks forward to working with you and your children to set goals and heal, grow and look forward to a new lease on life.