I've been holding group sessions for parents of kids home from treatment programs, or on their way home.
About the sessions
Specifically for parents looking for strategies,tools, support and community through the lens of Conscious Parenting, as they accompanying their teen/young adult transitioning home, or home, from residential treatment.
We will loosely be focusing on:
-Understanding your own role in your teen and family's healing, including tools for navigating your emotions.
-How to attune to your teen/young person and understand what they really need, despite what everyone is telling you.
-Contracts, rules and boundaries.
-Resources/services (In-person and virtual support ideas, books, podcasts, etc.)
These were some of our takeaways from past sessions:
The future can only be re-programmed in the present. Our tendency as parents is to look back at the past to find evidence for who are child is in the present, and who she will be in the future. Our role in their healing is critical, and by releasing these past perceptions, we open the door to help usher in new energy and visions of possibility for our young people's transformation.
“I closed my mouth, and spoke to you in a thousand silent ways”- Rumi. We talked a lot about how we often struggled with the “right” words to say, to encourage, to calm, to appease. We reminded ourselves that often it was better to say very little, and to recognize that what our children really need to feel from us - our love, acceptance, compassion, forgiveness and even playfulness and joy - are not conveyed through words but through our energy.
The concept of control, and how little of it we have with our kids, and with anything really! As such, our precious energy needs to go into the only thing we can control, which is ourselves. Modelling our own work of healing in the way that we would like our children to do one day - The work of allowing and processing our feelings, of understanding our emotional blueprints, and most of all cultivating a practice which gives us a greater sense of peace and connection to our deeper wisdom. What they see and sense from us is so much powerful than any words we could say.
Radical acceptance. I think many of us have found ourselves wishing for things to be different, why there often seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel, why our lives have become so incredibly challenging. In short, we resist reality. As part of this we often judge ourselves, our decisions and tell ourselves if we could just “figure it out” or say the “right” thing, or put our kid in touch with the magic resource, all would be better. All of this creates an incredible amount of anxiety. Instead, when we observe ourselves resisting what is, we can try and bring this sense of acceptance, of expansiveness and self-compassion rather than grasping and constriction.
Allowing discomfort. When are kids are home from treatment our biggest fear is often regression. “Please don’t let things go back to the way they were” we whisper to ourselves. We run around trying to set up supports, find the perfect therapist, group, community, connections, school, etc. I know, this is me, and it makes complete sense for these vulnerable kids. And, I know sometimes that I am operating with a false belief that my daughter's path to healing can be orchestrated by me; instead I know I have to keeping working on my OWN discomfort with her loneliness, her sadness, her fear, and hold a vision of her healing and possibility in my heart and mind that goes against the image of brokenness the system has labeled her with.
Shame/guilt - We talked a little about this and how present these emotions often are in our interactions with our kids. No matter how much work we do, we can still hear this little voice saying, “You know you had some role to play in this..”. It puts into question our worthiness as parents, and I think often for mothers, our very value as women. Shame is insidious and adds a charge to all our interactions with or kids as our core sense of “okayness” is at play. I certainly have no magic answers, other than to just be aware and call it by its name when it rears its head. I’ve also found that often now I am able to connect to a deeper knowing — that my kids really do have their own paths, which are theirs to tread, and an expanded understanding around what makes a life meaningful (The old ideas of the traditional pathways to a “successful life”, have fortunately for everyone been thrown out long ago!)
Resources
Here are also a couple blog posts I recently wrote about work to guide my daughter and not lose myself, are relevant to our conversations. - Transitions and A Few Things 2023 Taught Me
Thank you!
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