Are you feeling guilty about the times when you are angry at your child(ren)? Are you frustrated that you don’t respond better to your child’s problem behaviors? Do you and your partner bicker about what you should be doing, increasing blame without coming to an agreement? Since having a child, have you and your partner become more like roommates than people in love?
Parenting is hard! There is the challenge of keeping up with all of the changes that your child goes through while maintaining consistency in your life. There is the challenge of having a shared understanding with your partner about what is happening with your child and how best to address it. We can feel angry, cut off, and/or vulnerable when we don’t know what to do. When our decisions lead to conflicts with our children, we can feel angry, guilty and incompetent. We can feel isolated and shaken when parenting disagreements create tension with our partners. For all of us parents, there are times when the responsibilities become overwhelming. Depending on your childhood, your child’s innate qualities, and the environment in which you raise your child, feeling overwhelmed will happen more or less frequently. At those times, it’s essential to have people who will help you to regain your balance.
I help with parenting and partnerships by developing the skills and emotional awareness that will help you to adjust to the ongoing changes and developments that are part of relationships. By providing a safe structure, I can help you grow closer to your partner and child, gain knowledge, improve communication, heal wounds, and increase trust. This structure supports you in engaging with each other as a caring family from a place of curiosity that embraces mistakes and supports learning. You will learn how to support each other when you lose balance. You will leave sessions confident that you can manage difficult situations while staying connected. If this is what you are looking for, please email or call me so that we can talk about how I can help you.
Knowing that connected, supportive relationships are important for all of us is helpful. Special supportive relationships are referred to as attachment relationships. People (adults and children) who have healthy attachments are calmer, more resilient, and can think more clearly. Qualities that make an attachment healthy include predictability, safety, mutuality, and comfort, with both individuals having pleasure in the relationship. Providing this relationship for your child is crucial for their health and development. Having these relationships with others is also crucial for your health and growth!
As parenting is such a complex undertaking, that engages both conscious and unconscious parts of our being, there can be times when attachments start breaking down, or aren’t supportive enough. If you need to deal with personal issues that you don’t want to share with your closest friends, if you don’t feel attached to anybody in a helpful way, or if you aren’t getting answers that feel right to you, it could be beneficial to get outside help. I can offer individual support through skill building, dealing with issues (wounds) from your childhood, developing self-awareness, increasing your knowledge of development, or clearing up conflict between you and your partner. If you are curious about what this might look like, please email or call me to schedule a time to discuss how I could help you.
Suggested Resources:
Reading:
Parenting from the Inside Out by Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell
The Power of Showing Up by Daniel J Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
The Parenting by Connection Reader (Adobe PDF)
Links:
Hand in Hand — A Bay Area Parent Support Organization
Positive Discipline — A System for Structuring Parent/Child Relationships
Touch the Future — Inspiration for Parents, Teachers and Caregivers