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Parenting Workshop for Parents Caught in Abuse Cycles

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Approach

The way i approach it comes from two (related) disciplines, that of Non-Violent Communication (NVC, which you can read about here: http://cnvc.org/ ) and core Mindfulness (coming from my yoga and meditation experience).

Between the two of these areas of study, the outline is as follows:

Phase One: Parental Self-Knowledge

  1. help parents build a greater sense of their own worth, dignity and potential
  2. give parents skills to self-soothe
  3. give parents skills to see their own feelings clearly, and without judgment
  4. give parents skills to see their own needs clearly, and without judgment
  5. give parents skills to see clearly the strategies they are currently using to meet their own needs.
  6. give parents skills to see situations clearly, and without judgment

A key point of this section is that parents will act, knowingly or not, to meet their own needs. Everyone does. If those needs are obscured to the parent, then it is likely that their attempts to meet those needs will conflict with the child's efforts to meet his or her own needs. The more difficult the parent's background, the more difficult it is to understand their own needs, and the more troubled will be the relationship between parent and child. This is one of the core reasons that abuse is such a cycling trauma, recurring over generations in the same family.

Phase Two: Helping Meet Children's Needs

  1. help parents understand their child's needs, without judgment.
  2. help parents understand that it is necessary to meet both their own needs and the child's needs.
  3. help them recognize how children's behaviors are an expression of children seeking to meet their needs, and to communicate those needs to their caregiver.
  4. give parents skills to see clearly the strategies they are currently using to meet the needs of their child.
  5. help parents understand that the "triggers" they encounter with their children represent core unmet needs of their own (and do not mean they are bad people).
  6. help parents create strategies that will allow them to meet their own needs and the needs of their child, to the greatest extent possible.

That's it in a nutshell. There's more, of course, but i know this to be very effective and powerful. I look forward to sharing it more with folks in the coming years.